Chris Castle and Tom Naab in A Christmas Survival GuideQuad City Music Guild's A Christmas Survival Guide, with its sentiment, irreverence, and cheeky humor, is almost exactly my kind of holiday celebration. Wednesday night's dress rehearsal - and the show was so finely polished that I hardly think it necessary to state that it was a dress rehearsal - had me smiling, chuckling, and itching to sing along with the familiar songs included in this musical revue.

The Quad City SingersIn the beloved Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films of the 1930s, staging a full-length musical production seemed ridiculously easy: A bunch of talented youths would simply unite with the rallying cry "Let's put on a show!"

Yet according to Lori Potts, director of the area vocal-jazz ensemble the Quad City Singers, her group's inception came about just as simply - although the rallying cry, in that case, was more along the lines of "Let's put on a concert!"

"It was really just kind of casual," says Potts of the Quad City Singers' 1994 beginnings. "Just friends getting together and deciding, 'You know, we like to sing, so let's form a group and see what happens.'"

Dallas Drummond, Chris Castle, and Nathan Batles in Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat When I learned that Quad City Music Guild's new presentation of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat would feature a cast of nearly a hundred - 98, to be exact - I was both thrilled and slightly concerned. Thrilled because ... well, come on, what fan of musicals wouldn't want to see and hear an assemblage of that many performers?

But my concern stemmed from wondering what director Harold Truitt was going to do with them all. Even with 56 members of the children's chorus seated on both sides of the stage, apart from the main action, 42 seemed a rather excessive number of participants for this enjoyably featherweight biblical piece. Would Joseph's enormity prove beneficial, or detrimental?