Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat began in 1968 as a fifteen-minute pop cantata for an end-of-term concert at Colet Court school in London, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice when both were in their twenties. It was the first of their works to be performed in public. Successive expansions turned it into a full evening: the Genesis story of Joseph and his brothers told through borrowed styles — calypso, country, French chanson, a rock-and-roll number for Pharaoh. By 2008 more than twenty thousand productions had been mounted by schools and amateur companies alone.