‘Hot Santa’, Raging Bull and a Toy Story vibe help to rebuild The Snowman for a new generation

“Top of the show!” says Will Tuckett. On the grand piano, musical director Andy Massey strikes up an arpeggio that could melt the most frozen of hearts: “We’re walking in the air …” It is The Snowman, of course. Raymond Briggs’ 1978 picture book was animated for the screen in 1982 with a score by Howard Blake and became a hit stage show in 1993, an annual outing for Birmingham Rep ever since. Now it’s getting a reboot, directed by Tuckett, former Royal Ballet dancer turned choreographer and director of everything from the National Ballet of Japan’s Nutcracker to a stage adaptation of In the Night Garden.

We’re in a studio in Birmingham. As the overture plays, a large wooden box in the centre of the room opens like the cover of a book, to become a house. There’s a kitchen, a couple at the table with a pot of tea and an endearing puppet cat winding round their legs. Upstairs, a boy wakes up, looking forward to Christmas.

The Snowman is a perennially popular show but “it needed a bit of a refresh,” says Tuckett. “Theatre’s changed a lot in 30 years – expectations have changed.” Audiences are so used to the latest effects that the scenes where the Snowman takes the boy flying, for example, were starting to lack the wow factor. The old show used a one-point harness to lift the actors, and if you drifted in the wrong direction “you had to swim back,” says Tuckett, miming the breaststroke in mid-air. Now they have a fancy automated system that lets them dance through the air against a backdrop by video designer Nina Dunn. “I was blown away,” says Tuckett. “She made all the snow feel 3D, the landscape 3D.” The effect will be much more filmic and immersive.

Puppetry is also much more sophisticated and ubiquitous than it was in 1993, from the trailblazing War Horse to the Paddington musical whose designer Tahra Zafar has created a Snowman costume, which can blink and smile as well as dance. Daisy Beattie has designed a menagerie of puppets, which the dancers manipulate: the curious cat, two pheasants on wheels, a lone fox and some sweet rabbits. Other things you can’t change too much. “The score is the score,” says Tuckett, although there are always tweaks. The original used lots of synth-y samples on keyboards, but the quality of sound you can generate electronically now is completely different.

Most important, though, is the story. “And it’s a story told through dance, it’s not a ballet with a story,” Tuckett clarifies. We might think of The Snowman as a bit saccharine, but “it’s a book about loneliness, and ultimately, it’s a book about loss”. He’s rejigged scenes to show that there’s lots of love, too. The simplicity of this story is the antidote to the fast-cut craziness of modern kids’ entertainment where “there’s a glitter shower – and then all the pyros go off,” he says. “This is very simple, very honest. It’s really about human relationships and family, but none of it is too heavy.” His job is “to slow things down, but keep things moving”.

Tuckett and the team had multiple visits to pore over Briggs’ original artworks. “It’s really emotional seeing it, because I was given the book as a kid at Christmas,” says Tuckett. “Going back and seeing his original marks and little notes on it, and the original cover – he used Tippex for some of the snow – it was just amazing.”

Tuckett opens his laptop and brings up an illustration of the boy and the Snowman flying. “It’s really hard to look at it and not well up and remember when you were small and when your kids were small.” He zooms in on the details. “I don’t want [the show] to look like a panto – it should feel like the drawings.” He and Zafar had been discussing how the simplest things are often the hardest. “Have you seen Raging Bull?” he asks, a reference I was not expecting. He describes how in Martin Scorsese’s film, all the boxing rings were different sizes and shapes, to give different visual effects, even though it’s ostensibly the same setting. The video projections will do some similar changing of perspective, but there are painted sets too. In the workshop, I find a giant snowy tree taking up the whole room.

The book is only around 30 pages long, the film was 26 minutes, and the stage show will be around an hour, so Tuckett’s job is to expand on the material, yet stay true to it, while making it all a bit less gendered. “Like, could the dad not just sit in his chair smoking a pipe and falling asleep while his wife does the washing up and the ironing?” says Tuckett. The biggest change will be more proper dancing. There are some new characters “who are really zoomy” and a Father Christmas who is “a beautiful classical dancer,” says Tuckett. “His jacket is a bit like one of those huge North Face ones, and when he takes it off, he looks like Hot Santa,” Tuckett laughs. “And it means then he can properly dance.”

In the previous show, they cast actors in the role of the young boy, but Tuckett has brought in dancers. Four of them, aged 11-14, will rotate the role. “We tried the flying the other day and it was really fun,” says one dancer, Tristan, while Tate, another, adds: “We get all those features from the film and the book and make them come to life.” Jake says: “It’s really cool being part of a new production and seeing how it’s made.” He watches the Snowman film every Christmas with his mum.

Tuckett felt that the show, as it was, had become increasingly something for little kids. “I felt there was a bit of a disconnect with the adults in the audience.” The book, he says, is “so well observed, and the humour in it works if you’re a kid, but as an adult, it’s really clever”. Briggs’ illustration of the melted snowman still brings a lump to the throat. Is it going to be a Toy Story vibe, I ask: the kids will be laughing, the parents crying? “It’s totally that,” smiles Tuckett.

• The Snowman is at Birmingham Rep until 1 November, then Peacock theatre, London, 21 November-3 January 2027