When the time comes for the Great British Public to choose the next Hamlet by TV poll, as the time surely will, it will matter a lot if the viewers opt for a teenage goofball whose claim consists of looking and sounding like an alienated amalgam of the Gallagher brothers. It would also have mattered, though a bit less, if someone as appealing as Connie Fisher hadn’t made it through those cheesy tournaments in order to tootle in the excellent revival of The Sound of Music now at the Palladium.

But what of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which began life in a London prep school almost 40 years ago? Given the freshness and lack of pretension that marked the show even after its creators revised and extended it for the professionals at the shabby Young Vic, it would almost have been a plus if the whole grisly process had thrown up a larky kid with more enthusiasm than talent.

As it happens, it threw up Lee Mead, who turns out to be both talented and enthusiastic. Not much is asked of him as an actor. He needs to be melancholy when he’s thrown into prison, imperious when he greets the brothers who sold him into slavery, kindly when he forgives them, happy when he’s reconciled with that glum old dodderer, his grieving dad.

All this Mead manages well enough; but what distinguishes him is an attractive singing voice and, coming from beneath hair that owes more to Uncle Esau than father Jacob, lots of affable charisma.

He certainly makes a stronger star than Jason Donovan, whose underpowered, blonde-wigged Joseph in 1991 came across as the Goldilocks of Genesis. The director then was the late Steven Pimlott, and is so now, since this Dreamcoat is a restaging of his production. And I must say, I enjoyed it more last night than I did 16 years ago, even though I’d have liked more rough-theatre simplicity, less ostentatious ado. The chorus of ordinary-looking children helps a lot; but should the Egyptian court, for instance, look quite so much like Las Vegas in one of its over-the-top, let’s-improve-on-Tutankhamun modes?

Still, last night’s audience seemed enchanted. It remained cheerfully unfazed by a glitch in one of the theatre’s revolves that held up the show for a few minutes, and it responded warmly to everything: from Dean Collinson’s narcissistic Elvis lookalike of a Pharoah, to swirls of dancers in clothes that make even Joseph’s dreamcoat look like High Street curtain material, to Mead’s own bare chest when he sits in prison singing the ultra-tuneful Close Every Door. With spoofs of country music, calypso and even Piaf added to the mix, the show is a reminder of how splendidly versatile Lloyd Webber can be.

Nor has Rice written jauntier lyrics. What about the proto-Jungian dream-analyst’s reassuring words to Pharoah, “all those things you saw in your pyjamas are a long-range forecast for your farmers”, followed by the advice to him to “find a man to lead you through the famine with a flair for economic planning”? At that point you forgive the show’s occasional vulgarity and relish what’s still best about it: its youthful exuberance.

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