What the Ladybird Heard – Tall Stories, Palace Theatre and touring

Amini-musical for pre-schoolers, based on Julia Donaldson’s book of the same name, (see our interview with Julia in the last issue), this show has been around for a few years but it has settled. The present four actors have a palpable onstage rapport with both the audience and each other and Nikita Johal is delightful as the reassuring, very smiley Lily who also sings splendidly.

The show assumes that audience children are already very familiar with Julia Donaldson’s rhyming adventure story about a ladybird who thwarts a burglary on an idyllic farm. But the show also offers its young audience things they’re not expecting: songs by Jon

Fiber and Andy Shaw with additional lyrics by Howard Jacques, for instance. The words are witty, simple and clear

– in the hands of four actor-musicians – and the melodies very simple so that children can pick them up easily.

Another imaginative idea is the use of puppets – assembled from farmyard bits and pieces – to bring to life Donaldson’s cast of animal characters and Lydia Monks’s illustrations for the original book. A horse is created from a bicycle, an inverted long tin bath and a bucket while a hen emerges from an old brown cushion and a red rubber glove and a goose from a white watering can. It makes good theatre as children are invited to identify each animal as it is realised on stage.

Roddy Lynch is a solid, warmvoiced, comforting figure as the farmer and I enjoyed his sound effects on violin. Matthew McPherson is full of character as Hefty Hugh and a useful guitarist, while James Mateo-Salt is an entertaining Mr Bean-ish comic character initially pretending to be a theatre usher drawn into the show because they are one short.