Winnie the Pooh – Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield

Adaptor: Jonathan Rockefeller

Music and Lyrics: Robert and Richard Sherman, alongside A.A. Milne

It is fair to say that any musical or play based around A.A Milne’s many tales of Winnie the Pooh has a high standard to meet. These whimsical, enchanting and funny tales are beloved around the world and contain some of the most well-known characters in children’s literature.

Winne the Pooh, the new musical stage adaptation, has many charming elements to it, but unfortunately they don’t hold together in the way that any fans of Disney musicals would wish for. The storyline is loosely based on snippets of the A.A Milne stories, but they are linked together in a clunky fashion with no real overriding narrative.

We meet Winnie the Pooh almost immediately, in the middle of Hundred Acre Wood and he is an undeniably cute puppet, brought to life with great skill by the puppeteer Harry Boyd. Winnie the Pooh is about 4ft tall, meaning that Boyd must stoop the entire time to work the puppet controls – no mean feat in a 65 minute show with no interval. Piglet is, as Piglet should be, absolutely tiny which makes for some fun windswept acrobatics, ably conducted by Laura Bacon, who spends much of the show shuffling about on her knees. There is no shortage of dedication to the cause, that much is certain.

The story begins with Pooh waiting for his best friend Christopher Robin, who has gone off to school. While waiting, Pooh gets hungry and goes off on a search for some honey – seemingly the premise of the whole show, and a suitably clear one. Instead though, we are taken through multiple excerpts from stories, a change in seasons and a series of interactions between all the characters that are very one note, and don’t really go anywhere.

The constant underscoring of the whole show with whimsical background music is probably the most frustrating element – it means that some of the character dialogue is lost and the interactions between them lack effect. It felt like a fluffy Disney ride in which you were being relentlessly pushed through the different scenes to get you out the other end, rather than watching anything of substance.

What this show really misses, however, is audience interaction. The scenes have moments that are absolutely begging for a call and response from the audience, or some dance moves, in particular Tigger’s song and arguably the high point of the show, the Whoop de Whooper, Loop de Looper, Ally Ooper Bounce. Tigger, Roo and Rabbit sing and dance their way through this number, but it could have been so much more fun if they had involved the audience. At times it seemed like they were about to do this, with a couple of throwaway comments, but they didn’t seem to go anywhere or lead to anything.

Overall this show has huge potential and could be so much more fun – Eeyore is a gorgeous bundle of squishiness with some dead pan lines, there a couple of good songs, but it lacks oomph and left this big kid feeling let down that this childhood classic hasn’t been adapted into a stellar show.

Runs until 22nd June.