If you want to know how good a Christmas musical actually is, pay no attention at all to how you feel about it: pay careful attention instead to the eights and under-eights around you. How do they feel about it? If it’s no good, their faces will be pointing anywhere but at the stage. I can happily report that the small ’uns at The Old Rep’s production of Peter Pan last Saturday had their eyes on the show throughout. Which always takes a bit of doing.

Keeping the lights at a fairly low level throughout meant the scenery could be minimal and the story could get from one place to another briskly and without lengthy intervals. This was particularly true when the Darlings flew off to Neverland at the end of the first scene. The use of wires was especially good here: everybody had learned how to do it and there wasn’t a trace of awkwardness.

All the performers were skilled in terms of movement: best of all, when the action needed it, they were able to keep still. Voice projection was helped by some discrete microphones but this didn’t cause any distortion. And it helped a lot that everybody could sing.

Thea-Jo Wolfe was lively and likeable as Peter Pan and Rhian Lynch sympathetic as Wendy. It’s in the nature of the play, though, that much of the audience’s attention gets hoovered up by the antics of the chief bad guy – Hook. In the part, Matthew Christmas was assured and confident enough that he didn’t need to overdo it too much. His comic timing was bang on and Stefan Davis as Smee made a good straight man for him.

Stefan Davis also needs a lot of credit for his manipulation of the dog-puppet, ‘Nana’ – a wonderful hairy great creation that woofingly and growlingly grabbed everybody’s interest from the word go. Similarly, the giant crocodile was excellent – slimy green, glowey-eyed and seemingly huge as it loomed out of the shadows.

As this was billed as a ‘musical’, rather than a ‘pantomime’, we had original songs – and a pretty bunch of tunes they were, too. My only moan about the whole thing was that the instrumentation – not the singing – seemed to be pre-recorded. I understand that having live musicians might have added a lot to the ticket price and that, in the cramped space of The Old Rep, you might have struggled to squeeze in even a medium-sized band, but Birmingham is enjoying a bit of a golden age of musicianship at the moment and I can think of plenty of skilled Brummie muzos who’d have been very happy to get the gig.

Something, then, that you can confidently take the kids to.