Skylight’s Holiday Show Is Lots of Fun

Laura Paruzynski as the Narrator and Mason Hanizeski as Joseph in Skylight Music Theatre’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat, running November 14 through December 28, 2025.

With apologies to the mature Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer with many lyricists of Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita and Phantom of the Opera, I have a preference for him when he was the adolescent prodigy eager to prove his musical versatility with familiar echoes of popular hoedown, jamboree, calypso, disco, early rock and even French ballads. He started with the impish support of a slightly older fellow, a lyricist named Tim Rice.

Webber and Rice would go on to acclaim in serious and semi-classical musical theater, but a cantata they played around with and then tinkered with for decades became Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, popular in community and professional companies for decades.

At its best, such as the current Skylight Music Theatre version, it is playable and playful, unabashedly in a comedic operetta vein with its pop music and the biblical legend (here told to children) about Joseph, his cruel brothers, his slavery in Egypt and his life-changing ability to interpret dreams.

Other productions I’ve seen lost their way. I’ve groaned through several that got tangled up in the difference between light-hearted and dumb Keystone Kops antics. But Skylight artistic director Michael Unger has the right fable vision, the tongue-in-cheek humor and a good blend of powerful voices and nonstop comic dance abilities. Plus a solid team of technical support.

Scenic designer Jonathan Berg-Einhorn slides neon palm trees in and out, sends cutout animals and ears of corn marching across the stage, and rolls out a comic camel and an Egyptian chariot. Debra Krajec (formerly costume leader at Marquette University) has her minions, too, providing quick-change Bedouin keffiyehs (headdresses) and Egyptian tunics while choreographer Stephanie Staszak echoes many dance genres outstandingly — not only teaching everyone to walk like an Egyptian but dance the frug and the funk. The constant acrobatic energy and motion are a big plus in this production.

Usually I miss the presence of the live Skylight band, but here the slick recorded track apparently comes from Webber’s own Really Useful Group, an international production company, and the dream coat was rented from the original production’s costume shop.

The show is intelligently and subtly miked, and the 14 children’s voices are beautifully harmonic (they range in age from 10 to middle school and are also incorporated regularly into the staging). If the music had been live, the cast could have paused longer for outbursts of applause and lived more completely in the moment. But there certainly was no delay in pacing and music director David Bonofiglio (visible on TV monitors) keeps things together.

The production is also a showcase for Mason Hanizeski as Joseph whose youthful vigor and warm baritone are knockouts in the two songs most like the Webber that modern audiences know: “Any Dream Will Do” and “Close Every Door.”

As the Narrator guiding the children through the events, Laura Paruzynski has standout big notes and a lithe personable manner echoing the show’s many musical moods. She need not try so hard to win us over – we’re there, but would appreciate more comedic slyness. There is fine singing and slapstick Elvis gyrations by Alex Campea who has multiple roles relying on his height and strong tones.

Even in good productions, there is some danger of campy overplay in this show, since the music and an energetic cast spoof so many genres, albeit with fine singing and snappy movement. So you could argue some overstay in the Elvis reprise, the extended Belafonte touches of “Benjamin Calypso,” the mambo of “Grovel Grovel” and the Gallic humor and La Danse Apache of “Those Canaan Days’ – but I found the whole Parisienne parody hilarious as were Rice’s joking laments about starving: “No one comes to dinner now We’d only eat them anyhow.”

The Skylight sums it all up at the end in an extended curtain call, “Megamix,” which sheds the many costumes of the ensemble for white pullovers. Each set of two players takes an extended bow, which gives the audience a chance to single out Shawn Holmes who led the calypso lyrics, Jesse Weinberg who led the cowboy hijinks of “One More Angel in Heaven,” and Jake Horstmeier as the Gallic cutup in the “Canaan” number. There was fine work by others, too, with most of the women also playing men.

I took special pleasure in noticing how many musical styles I grew up with, but the quality of the show and the spoofs are not just for people who lived through the times of Belafonte, Elvis and Scottish rock ‘n’ roll.

The children onstage should be a lure to get more children in the audience. They will both envy their fellow youngsters and emulate them — and probably know more than their parents expect about the genres being spoofed. This holiday show runs through December 28 at the Cabot Theater, 158 N. Broadway. More info at https://www.skylightmusictheatre.org/joseph.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Gallery

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, a family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com.