WHEN a boyband member goes solo, it is usually an attempt to distance himself from the embarrassing frivolity of a teenybop past. But Stephen Gately, still dubbed “the cute one from Boyzone”, seems content to keep it nice and cosy by starring in this revival of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first collaboration.

Nice and cosy is certainly what is required for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which began life as a 20-minute piece for a school concert in 1968. Despite being expanded in the 1970s to become a touring stalwart for the producer Bill Kenwright, and given a high-tech West End makeover by Stephen Pimlott in 1991 starring Jason Donovan, it retains its classroom innocence. Eminem in the title role wouldn’t really work.

If Pimlott’s production was a juggernaut of a production, then this West End revival, directed by Kenwright, is more of a comfy camper van. Built around a moveable staircase flanked by a seated children’s choir, its most high-tech effect is the inflatable sheep that sprout through the steps to conjure up the countryside.

With Rice’s lyrics leaping from a well-thumbed rhyming dictionary and Lloyd Webber offsetting soupy ballads with pastiches ranging from calypso to cowboy hoe-down, this is more panto than parable and Kenwright knows it — a Chevalieresque chanson even features a French onion-seller.

Gately adopts that tremulous emoting into the middle distance we’ve come to expect from boyband balladry that works best for Joseph’s prison lament, Close Every Door. But whether being sold into slavery by his 11 jealous brothers or rising in the Pharaoh’s court through his ability to interpret dreams, Gately has the same puppy-dog stare; even in prison his expression seems that of a little kid who has just had his ice-cream stolen.

Gately’s naive charm sets the tone of the show, complete with punch-the-air choreography, but it can only go so far. His beaming smile can’t hide what is slender material overstretched to two acts. The second half is padded out with reprises — the gyrations of Trevor Jary’s Presley-like Pharaoh are fun once, but three times? — and an extended clap-along curtain call of the catchier tunes rewards your patience with Gately eventually heading heavenward in his expanding multi-coloured glory.

So you could say he rises to the occasion for his West End debut. But it’s in a show that is still a piece of youthful whimsy. Even at two hours it strays well past its bedtime.

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