Though I’m not about to equate Rice and Lloyd Webber with Shakespeare (I’m not that jet-lagged), I found myself unexpectedly misty-eyed at both shows, as if some inner pressure valve had been opened. And I was reminded that sometimes a few hours at the theater, whether silly or profound (or both, as in the case of “Dream”), can do as much good as a week’s vacation.

“Joseph,” based on the Old Testament tale of the boy in rainbow-hued outerwear who was nearly done in by his rivalrous brothers, was created more than 50 years ago. It’s a slight, bouncy little piece of story theater (its first professional incarnation was just half an hour long) that has expanded over the years into a bloated, family-friendly spectacle that often has urbane grown-ups bolting for the bar.

This latest version, directed by Laurence Connor, is big, all right, but in a gleeful, giddy way that matches its environs. The Palladium has been the setting for deluxe variety shows since the 1920s, with diverse headliners who have included the Three Stooges and Kathy Griffin, Frank Sinatra and Elton John, Judy Garland and Rufus Wainwright doing Judy Garland.

Mr. Connor, who did a fine job directing Mr. Lloyd Webber’s “School of Rock,” has appropriately conceived his “Joseph” in that music-hall tradition. It’s a warm-weather equivalent of a Christmas pantomime, with performers (including a multicast chorus of children) dressing up in deliberately hokey costumes, cutting vaudevillian capers and warbling insidiously tuneful, pastiche ditties that stick to the memory liked chewed bubble gum.

Its ensemble strategically mixes elements that would have been familiar to Palladium audiences of yore. There is the fresh-faced, stardom-bound ingénue (the appealing newcomer Jac Yarrow, who sings with the whispery sincerity expected of Lloyd Webber heroes); the sentimental old favorite (the pop star Jason Donovan, who played Joseph on the same stage in 1991, here as a scene-stealing Pharaoh) and the knock-’em-dead marquee star.