For a musical that has been around the globe and graced every kind of stage from London’s West End to schools and community centres, Honk! should feel well served by the students and staff of BHS.

The Stiles and Drewe musical adaptation of The Ugly Duckling is, of course, a heartwarming tale of tolerance and coming of age, with a script driven by punchy tunes and fowl puns — that give both children and their parents something to giggle about.

The BHS set centres on a farmyard pond, surrounded by artful reeds holding up a nest of four, make that five, eggs.

Mother Ida, played by Lauren Genevieve, sits waiting patiently for her new family to hatch. Any musical must be carried by its tunes and Miss Genevieve delivers throughout with a powerful voice that belies her young age. Her songs are as convincing as her doting concern for the duckling that becomes known simply as Ugly.

Rejected by Drake, the delinquent dad played by Hannah Lampit, (who is always “ducking out on his responsibilities”), his four siblings and rest of the farmyard menagerie, Ugly cuts a despondent, yet lovable figure searching for a place to call home.

From his first attempt at a Quack! which comes out as a Honk!, Zoe O’Connor’s Ugly is wide-eyed, exuberant, awkward, ungainly, and entirely charming.

His vulnerability makes him an easy target for the sly and slightly menacing Tom Cat, played by the ever-able Emma O’Donnell. Tom Cat carries a debonair French accent placing the character somewhere between Pepe LePew (of Bugs Bunny fame) and Cruella DeVille!

Mistakenly abandoned by Ida, Ugly find’s himself playing a game of cat and duck (well cygnet) with Tom, who uses all manner of tricks to turn Ugly into supper.

Fortunately, Ugly is lent a few helping hands along the way. From the flight of geese, presented as airplane pilots and flight attendants, to a jolly green frog, who has long since accepted that ugly is part of life, the musical keeps a well known plot moving along.

In a production punctuated by engaging performances, the playful romance between Tom Cat and the sophisticated house cat Queenie, played by Sophia Marshall is perhaps the highlight.

Tom Cat finds himself temporarily distracted from his pursuit of a meal by a pursuit of another kind, much to the chagrin of Queenie’s best friend and housemate Lowbutt, played by the outraged and very funny Brittney Goddard. For Miss O’Donnell and Miss Marshall, this was a reprisal of their romance as Danny Zuko and Sandra Dee in last year’s Grease, but unlike that performance Tom Cat does not change his ways.

The end of this tale is well known, the cat is undone, the mother relieved and the swan revealed, but the BHS production does not rely on plot twists, instead it rests comfortably on delightful voice of Miss Genevieve and the charm of Miss O’Connor, whose quest of acceptance, tolerance and love is one we can all find comfort in.