Published by The Stage, 6 December 2017. Ugly Duckling runs at The Albany until 31 December, and continues its UK tour in January. The show is for children aged 3 and up and their families.

Tutti Frutti Productions begins its adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a baby bird hatched into the wrong nest using puppetry, then switching into live action as the tale takes off.

It’s a good call on Tutti Frutti artistic director Wendy Harris’s part, enabling the company to set the scene for a young audience before adopting a less literal dressing-up box aesthetic that makes for a very stylish piece of children’s theatre.

Catherine Chapman’s inventive design uses sunglasses to suggest beaks, woolly jumpers as feathers, and paper flags to stand in for snow, leaving plenty of room for Mike Redley’s lighting and Tayo Akinbode’s score to help conjure up the urban park where our story takes place.

Danny Childs does an excellent line in gangly awkwardness as the Ugly Duckling, wide-eyed in his dealings with Daniel Naddafy’s Fluffy, the mean older brother who nudges him from the nest.

Also playing some of the characters that Ugly encounters in the wilds of the park gives Naddafy a chance to have fun with different accents and physicalities. Maeve Leahy, meanwhile, keeps the show grounded with her tender portrayal of the mother duck, and reveals a fine singing voice too – it’s a shame that after her sweet song there’s little live music to be heard, replaced by recorded music that jars in both its tone and volume.

Emma Reeves’s script steers clear of excessive tweeness. The message of ‘it’s what you do that matters, not what you look like’ is hardly revelatory but, buffered by a lot of genuinely funny physical comedy and a surprisingly moving piece of dance (props to movement director Holly Irving), Tutti Frutti more than gets away with it.