Red Riding Hood

Red Riding Hood is a 45-minute family musical for young children, staged on the Upper East Side. It retells the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood in a comic, warm-hearted way, with an original score and original songs. Dancers carry the story on stage, and the songs move it along.

92NY presents it through its Theater for Young Audiences series, known as TYA, a program of 92NY Musical Theater. This is a return engagement: the production was already part of the 2025–26 TYA season, and it opens the 2026–27 season. The run is limited to nine weekend-morning performances.

Little Red, the show's bold, high-spirited heroine, sets out through the countryside with a homemade cake for her grandmother. The cake is the trouble. A very hungry Wolf wants it badly enough to eat Red and Grandmother along with it, and Red has no idea.

The tone stays comic and warm-hearted, written with small children in mind. The three characters to know are Little Red, Grandmother and the Wolf.

The score and songs are original, so there is no existing catalog to recognize. Kevin F. Story wrote the music, and Polly Hilton wrote the book and lyrics. Andrew Heidorn is credited with orchestrations and additional songs in a listing for the 2025 run.

Story has written fairy-tale musicals for children before, working with Jeffrey Sanzel at Theatre Three in Port Jefferson, Long Island. Sanzel is one of this show's two adapters.

The company is an ensemble of contemporary and jazz dancers, with both singing and non-singing roles, so movement does much of the storytelling. The hall is small and close-up: a flexible-seating room with a small proscenium stage, a muraled ceiling and a ballroom feel.

The story is much older than its first printed version. It grew out of European folk tales told in what is now France, Italy and the German-speaking lands. Charles Perrault printed the earliest known version in 1697, and the red hood was his addition. The Brothers Grimm included the tale, as Rotkäppchen, in the first edition of Children's and Household Tales in 1812. The two versions end differently.

An earlier run of this production played in autumn 2025, with the same writing team and director.