Boston Herald: Technicolor Dreamcoat’ a nice fit for North Shore Music Theatre

Meet our hero: a dreamer who dreams of being a dreamer who interprets dreams. No, this isn’t “Inception: The Musical!” It’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” a show that’s essentially about nothing.

But as generations of community and regional theater companies know, it isn’t substance that’s made it a staple, it’s the flash. It makes sense that North Shore Music Theatre would choose it for its reopening season. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical is a buoyant sugar rush - a big, silly biblical variety show - with hippies!

This “Joseph” features “American Idol” season four finalist Anthony Fedorov in the title role. He’s well-suited for it - charismatic and wide-eyed, with a voice like microwave-warmed honey.

The story, culled loosely from the Old Testament, tracks Joseph on a “Candide”-like journey of optimism in the face of a harsh world. Joseph is his father’s favorite son and darn cocky about it, so his jealous brothers betray him and sell him into slavery. He goes from prisoner to prince in short order, meeting disposable characters along the way. The story is told to a choir of children via an all-singing narrator (Jennifer Paz).

Like most Lloyd Webber shows, “Joseph” is filled with simple, repetitive melodies that burrow into your brain and put down stakes. “Close Every Door” is the kind of melodramatic ballad Lloyd Webber built his career on. But he also plays around in a variety of musical sandboxes, parodying everything from French cabaret to Elvis to calypso.

These songs are fine the first time, but most every number in the show has at least two encores, plus a weird, Backstreet Boys-style reprise during the encore. Take out all the repetition, and “Joseph” would probably run less than an hour.

Still, there’s no arguing with an ensemble this talented. Directed and choreographed by Jayme McDaniel, the cast features a bevy of gifted performers. Paz croons and beams like a Disney princess, and Daniel C. Levine flexes chops vocal and comedic in the brothers’ lament, “Those Canaan Days.”

The ensemble belts and dances in an endless variety of Jose Rivera’s shiny costumes on a set that looks like the backdrop to a “Brady Bunch” fever dream. If the show is pure candy, why not go all out?

At its worst, “Joseph” is sickly sweet. But at its best, its whirling dazzle can transport you to a place of pure, silly joy. Kind of like “American Idol,” come to think of it.