From Gruffalo to Dog Man: How to Put Children’s Classics on Stage | stage

From Paddington and the BFG to The Gruffalo’s Child, My Neighbor Totoro to The Tiger Who Came to Tea, there’s no shortage of theatrical adaptations of children’s classics filling theaters right now.

It was announced this week that Dog Man, the half-canine crimefighter from Dav Pilkey’s best-selling graphic novels, will make his London stage debut at the Southbank Center next summer.

The musical — which was adapted by Kevin Dell’Aguila and previously sold off-Broadway — “exceeded my highest expectations” and left the audience “especially me, in complete awe,” Pelkey ​​said. But how do writers go about bringing cherished characters to life in an entirely new medium?

“When I was assigned to adapt Dog Man, my son was in fourth grade and was very familiar with the books, so it was very helpful to have a young expert at the breakfast table every morning,” Del Aguila said.

“It all comes down to tone,” said the Emmy Award-winning writer and actor, whose credits include theatrical versions of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Click, Clack, Moo and Pilkey’s Cat Kid Comic Club.

“If the show doesn’t feel like the books, the audience will revolt. They’ll have quibbles no matter what — ‘That guy doesn’t look like the character in the book’ or ‘That character doesn’t speak the way I heard them in my head’ — but if you can capture the sensibility of the books, I’ve found they can forgive all that and go along for the ride.”

He said the children felt a special ownership of the Dog Man’s world because the books felt happy not to be supervised by adults. It was this feeling of “fun chaos” that the team wanted to capture. He added that Becky himself did not intervene significantly.

“He had only one condition when we started writing the show: Dog Man couldn’t talk. And if you’ve ever been told that the beloved main character in a musical you’re writing can only bark, you’ll understand the profound horror we felt. But we accepted the challenge and became innovators.”

Jessica Swale, whose film Paddington: The Musical at the Savoy at the Savoy premiered in London to positive reviews, said she began by reading and watching every book and movie about the bear before “putting them all down and asking the hard questions — why this story, why now, why on stage?”

Sowell wanted to create a version that “celebrated the play” rather than simply taking the films to the stage. She added characters and changed the story to include the art of theater—flying, magic, and choreography.

Swale’s central question is what Paddington’s journey means for contemporary Londoners: “This little bear, without home or family, arrives on a lifeboat, in a city where he hopes people will extend him kindness.” At the same time, it had to keep the story alive: “Volvo’s hybrid has died an early death.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge is the structural one. “Traditionally, the main character suffers from a fatal flaw that shapes the course of the story — the boastful character falls from grace, and the greedy man learns to share,” she said.

But Paddington, eternally kind and gentle, resists this model. So instead, Sewell focused on giving Brown and the group’s characters their own flaws that they overcame by learning from Paddington. “Judy battles her embarrassment, Mr. Brown learns to accept risks, and Mr. Curry learns to embrace people (or bears) from outside his neighborhood,” she said.

For Tom Morton-Smith, who adapted Studio Ghibli’s 1988 fantasy My Neighbor Totoro for the RSC, first at the Barbican, where it won six Olivier Awards, and then in the West End, immersion was also key.

He already knew the film, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, “but I had watched it over and over again.” He said that working in translation provides a degree of freedom: he can deviate from the original text while respecting its spirit.

He said: “What I knew was that the most important thing was not to cling to the original in a subservient way, but rather to find a way to evoke the same atmosphere and feelings that the film evokes.”

“I hope what we’ve achieved is a piece that feels in its bones like Totoro, rather than a hollow replica. It’s about finding the essence of what Miyazaki and Ghibli created and crafting something new – with the same rigor and care – but using the tools of live theatre.”

He added that the human characters in Totoro were crucial. “There are beautiful, mystical and sometimes surreal creatures in the story, but the audience meets them through the eyes of the family. So we had to achieve those dynamics. If the human characters seemed too cartoony, the forest spirits wouldn’t work at all.”

Morton Smith spoke of the “huge responsibility” of taking on such a beloved story. “If I do my job right, people won’t realize I did anything at all.”

But for smaller companies, the challenges often start long before the text: budgets, rights, and the legal maze of what is and what is not in the public domain.

Siblings Jonathan and Lucy Kaufman, whose recent adaptations include The Tales of Beatrix Potter for Spontaneous Productions in south London, say they usually limit themselves to works that are not subject to copyright.

“Specific challenges we faced included believing that the Beatrix Potter stories were in the public domain and discovering that they were not,” Lucy Kaufman said. “Fortunately, we found out in time and secured the rights. The latest was to write an exciting chase scene with 11 characters but only five actors – an exercise in logistics.”

Adaptations now account for more than half of UK theater box office receipts. A recent British Theater Union report found that venues were increasingly programming familiar titles to rebuild audiences post-Covid. In 2023, amendments accounted for 40.8% of all offers, up from 35.6% in 2019.

“As a writer, I always prefer to create original plays,” Jonathan Kaufman said. “But since popular stories tend to sell, my challenge is to transform familiar material into something new, engaging and, above all, relevant to modern audiences.”