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“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” is one of the most popular musicals from the team of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for regional and community theaters, so director Richard Amelius wanted to freshen it up for the upcoming Jersey Productions version.

“This is my seventh production of ‘Joseph’ so I didn’t want get in the habit and get bored,” he said. “I wanted to give the actors something they’re responsible for creating themselves.”

One way to freshen it up, he said, was to make the children’s choir a more active part, not just observers on the sidelines, to cast the narrator as a teacher who helps the children weave in and out of the story.

Secondly, instead of costuming the characters in Biblical robes and desert wear, Amelius went for a more contemporary feel and dressed each of the brothers to reflect their individual characters. The brother with the country song, for instance, becomes a cowboy.

“And Joseph is just kind of ordinary, like an everyday man until you put the coat on him,” he said.

“But we still try to focus more on the story and not the production,” he said. “If you focus on the bigness, the characters begin to lose their humanity. There are some things that should strike us — the brothers hurting one of their own and Joseph being big enough to forgive them.”

• WHAT: “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”
• WHERE: Jersey Productions, Carnegie Center for the Arts, 1028 Scott St., Covington, Ky.
• WHEN: Through Dec. 23
• COST: $20-$25 adults; $18 students/seniors
• MORE INFO: (859) 957-1940; www.jerseyproductions.org