Songfacts®:

• 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. >>

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• 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."