Any Dream Will Do

This week will be the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webbe, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt (born 22 March 1948), is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were successful outside of their parent musicals, such as “Memory” from Cats, “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita, and “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 2001, The New York Times referred to him as “the most commercially successful composer in history”. 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, the 2008 Classic Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and an Emmy Award.[5][6][7] He is one of 18 people to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony.[8] He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors. His company, the Really Useful Group, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Lloyd Webber studied at the Royal College of Music. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the college for his “contribution to musical life”.
This song was used in the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It had never been released as a single before in the UK, but when Jason Donovan played the lead role in a 1991 West End production, they decided to release this track as a single. When it topped the UK charts, it became the only #1 for an artist from a show in which he appeared. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice originally wrote Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for an Easter concert at their school in 1967. They extended the show, and its first London production opened at the Albery Theatre in 1973. The song references Joseph’s abilities as a dream interpreter (“any dream will do”) and the loss of his coat of many colors (“My golden cloak flew out of sight, The colors faded into darkness”), a gift his father bestowed upon him in Genesis 37:3 for being his favorite son. We learn more about these plot points in the songs “Joseph’s Dreams” and “Joseph’s Coat.”This song was in the show right from the beginning, but Tim Rice didn’t realize its potential. He said in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, “It was #1 in Ireland and #1 in Australia quite soon after the show was written. It wasn’t until the Jason Donovan production in 1991 that it became a big bona fide hit single. Initially, we thought of it as a show song and put it on the studio album. Sometime later, about the middle of 1969, we recorded this choirboy called Christopher singing Any Dream Will Do for a single and I changed the lyrics, not completely but I took out the references to ‘Colored Coats’ and anything to do with Joseph. This was silly because that was the appeal of the song.”
The tune for this song was originally, before being used in Joseph, written for a song called “I Fancy You.” Tim Rice was working with EMI at the time and he hoped to somehow get Herman’s Hermits to sing it. A popular version of “Any Dream Will Do” is by Donny Osmond, who played Joseph in a touring production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat from 1992-1997. Osmond landed a hard-fought comeback hit in 1989 with “Soldier Of Love,” but instead of staying on that path, he zagged into the role of Joseph, which was supposed to be just a six-month engagement. “I thought, I’m taking a calculated risk here,” Osmond told Songfacts. “I’m changing everything about my career. And that six-month engagement just kept getting bigger and bigger.”