When it’s good, “Journey to Bethlehem,” the latest faith-based film to take a shot at The Nativity Story, is playful and fun with actors who figure their characters are a bit campy, and vamp accordingly.

It’s a musical with plenty of “dramatic license” taken with Biblican accounts of the birth of Jesus. But we aren’t talking Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” blasphemous.

King Herod, for instance. He’s given that smoldering intensity that we’ve come to expect from the great Antonio Banderas. But he’s a vain tippler here, who loves his wine. And when former “Evita” star Banderas vamps through his villainous “Its great to be King” number, a longtime fan can’t help but be tickled.

The angel Gabriel (Grammy-winning Christian singer and rapper Lecrae) manifests himself in virginal Mary’s bedroom and nervously rehearses his lines about her (Fiona Palomo) being “chosen” for this very special assignment from On High.

That’s going to be a hard sell, he figures.

Mary has met the man she is to be married off to — pre-pregnancy. But she and he don’t know who each other are, and fruit shopping in the marketplace he flirts like an ancient Palestinian playa.

“I’m just friendly,” Joseph (Milo Manheim) insists.

And the Magi? They’re the stars of their own show, perhaps the best one-act play Tom Stoppard (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”) never wrote — “Magi Shmagi.” These “wise men” (Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers) from the East study, debate, kvetch and joke their way westward, following this mysterious star they figure portends the birth of the Son of God.

Director and co-writer Adam Anders, a veteran composer who wrote songs for Ace of Base and the score for the musical “Rock of Ages,” has made a lightweight faith-based film that’s Biblically loose and historically laughable.

But he serves up a diverse cast — Lecrae wears cornrows, gold lipstick and bright blue contact lenses to play Gabriel — some decent singers, actors who can handle comedy and El Jefe Banderas in a musical that borrows production number ideas from “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Evita” and that bit of Stoppard-esque business with the hilarious magi to give us a movie that even when it panders and stumbles and descends into self-seriousness, remains an adorably lighthearted take on Jesus: The Origin Story.

The leads have pleasant light pop singing voices, with Banderas and Joel Smallbone — playing Herod’s soldier-son — showing off Broadway-appropriate pipes.

The tunes are generally forgettable, with “Mary you’re so contrary…marry Mary marry Mary marry, it’s good for you” representative of the lyrics.

But when Herod and the visiting wise men warily size each other up, and bribes/gifts are offered to grease the wheels of their access to this unknown “pregnant” virgin, Omid Djalili as Melchior’s haughty milking of his, the best of ALL the gifts, “myrrrrrrrrrrrrh,” it’s a genuine spit-take. The laughs here work simply because they’re so unexpected.

The Spanish locations are passable, the costumes entirely too polished and laundered and the cast is never less than competent, if not wholly charismatic, top to bottom. It’s not “The Nativity Story” or “Risen,” the best of the Biblical epics of recent vintage. But whatever one’s expectations, the execution isn’t half-bad.

And as they used to say on the Bethlehem Borscht Belt, “It plays.”

More faith-based films like this and fewer with Kevin Sorbo, please and thank-you.

Rating: PG, threats of violence, “virgin birth” discussions, alcohol abuse

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Fiona Palomo, Milo Maheim, Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers, Joel Smallbone and Lecrae.

Credits: Directed by Adam Anders, scripted by Adam Anders and Peter Barsocchini, music and lyrics by Adam Anders, Nikki Anders and Peer Astrom. A Sony/Affirm release.

Running time: 1:38