We’ve had the cartoon, we’ve had the live-action films – so what can the stage bring to Dodie Smith’s novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians? Dani Parr’s revival of this adaptation by Debbie Isitt is a cuddlier affair than the production first staged by the playwright in Coventry in 2000. Out go gnarly allusions to Kosovo and Nazi Germany. In come jollier seasonal touches – some call-and-response, a Walking in a Winter Wonderland finale.

The result takes Smith’s story of dognapping in 1950s North London for a pleasant walk round the theatrical park. But it doesn’t really have enough bite. Perhaps the effort of shepherding three revolving casts of 30 local children, playing the dalmatian pups, has taken the spring out of the steps of the adult cast of seven. But some of the set-pieces are scrappy. And the performers are straining at the leash to give more energy to clever songs (by Grant Olding) tethered by tepid backing tracks.

It remains an effective story all the same. Poor, nice Mr and Mrs Dearly find their dogs Missis and Pongo have had 15 pups. Mrs D’s incongruous old schoolfriend, Cruella – you know the type, expelled for drinking black ink, hasn’t mellowed since – offers to take them. Mmm, she loves the look of soft, spotty dalmatian skin. Cruella and her hideous hirelings, it turns out, are on a quest to make the perfect canine coat.

Jaded adults will find Cruella, played with dash by Georgina Roberts, by some distance the most intriguing human on stage. But James Daniel Wilson as Pongo the dog and Emma Thornett as Mrs Dearly offer just the right sort of bounding energy to keep this show’s tail wagging. And if Mike Goodenough doesn’t quite live up to his name as an awkward Mr Dearly, he is happier as the villainous Jasper in a fat-and-thin double act with Tom Edden as Saul, marshalling puppies and watching Crimewatch from Cruella’s country lair.

The device of humans dressed as dogs sets the tone: it’s cute but dark, which I suppose explains why David Holmes’s lighting leaves chunks of the midstage shrouded in shadows. Some scenes, such as the Sheepdog and the Cat talking outside Cruella’s country lair, are slow. There’s talk of a tour: if it comes off, the production could do with a spring-clean first.

But the use of film, as Cruella and Co drive around wintry winter lanes, works well. Cruella’s red-velvet home exerts a sinister pull, and her second-act deterioration is suitably grisly.

With the last embers of Christmas spirit still glowing, helped along by spirited playing from the local pups, you’ll go with the flow. But director Parr hasn’t quite found the perfect tone with which to marry the merry and the macabre.

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