I first saw Joseph when I was eight, in an amateur production at the church where my father was the vicar, and I absolutely loved it. The fact that I loved this new, rather more expensive production every bit as much just goes to prove what I have always secretly feared: I haven’t really matured in 33 years.

High-minded commentators may speculate, with agonised expressions, about the enduring appeal of Lloyd Webber’s musicals. There is really no mystery: the fact is, they’re bloomin’ brilliant. All right, some of us are never going to get on with Starlight Express, but the early ones are incomparable – not least because they were written with Tim Rice. How many aspiring writers and musicians there must have been, over the past 30 years, who have envied the Rice/Lloyd Webber millions and tried to emulate these apparently simple successes. But not one has managed it.

This particular Joseph is, of course, slyly self-referential, although certainly not postmodern in any other way. In this musical about dreams coming true, Lee Mead, from Essex, cab driver’s son and winner of the television talent show Any Dream Will Do, takes to the West End stage in nothing but a skimpy loincloth and a smile. How does he fare? He’s perfect. With his flashing white teeth and dark ringlets, he could just about pass as an ancient Hebrew – more so than Jason Donovan, anyway. And his voice, though sometimes stretched to the limit, has real power and resonance.

Preeya Kalidas is also the business as the Narrator. Perhaps she didn’t do quite enough warm-up voice exercises beforehand – for the first 10 minutes or so, she sounded as shrill on the top notes as a covey of Maria Callases, and you feared for any nearby glasses. Once she got going, however, shewas wonderfully clear, glamorous and assured. The other performer obviously having an absolute ball, to our general delight, was Dean Collinson, as Pharaoh: the King. Admittedly, Elvis’s moves are about the most imitable ever contrived, but Collinson does them with hilarious aplomb. The younger audience members responded enthusiastically, though some surely didn’t have a clue who Elvis was.

You chuckle all over again at Rice’s lyrics, the best of their type since WS Gilbert’s. “All those things you see in your pyjamas, / Are a long-range forecast for your farmers.” Lloyd Webber’s masterly magpie pastiches of reggae, rock’n’roll, even French accordion music, sound as fresh and funny as ever. And special mention for the choreographer, Anthony Van Laast. I never thought I’d find myself writing the words “witty choreography”, but there, I just did. The dancing was predictably slick and lithe. Less predictably, it was funny: in particular, Neal Wright as a tubby, booty-shakin’ Judah, and the Egyptian priests, in Hathor masks, doing a kind of slo-mo bovine break dance.

The single most important insight of the original director, Steven Pimlott, who died in February, was that, for all its glitz and glamour, its West End budget, the TV series behind it and the Lee hysteria, Joseph is a musical that works best when staged as a very, very good school play. There is the children’s chorus itself. There is a singing camel. The sun and moon, when they appear, are simply big spangly shapes on long poles, wielded by people off stage. The sheep are quite badly stuffed sheep, a little bit wobbly on the revolve, and the vulture on the edge of the pit wouldn’t fool David Blunkett. We know we’re making our way to Egypt at one point because three small pyramids and a plastic-looking sphinx traverse the stage – followed by a little London Eye. Kalidas gives it a momentary puzzled glance. Pure panto. How I laughed. The only feature in the show that bypasses this inspired amateurishness looks out of place – the huge screen overhead, showing a succession of rather irritating abstract patterns, like the ones that pop up, uninvited, in Windows Media Player. Although they bathe the stage in appropriate rainbow colours throughout, this might have been achieved without such jarring high-techery. It’s stuffed sheep and singing camels we want here, not plasma-screen tellies the size of tennis courts.

Of course, with tickets sold out until midsummer 2008, this is a show that is pretty much critic-proof. Under his dreamcoat, Joseph is wearing a Kevlar vest, guaranteed 100% effective against any poisonous little reviewers’ darts. But I reckon he could relax and take it off now if he wanted. Just enjoy the show.

Adelphi, WC2

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