Never mind Hilaire Belloc, here are The Tiger Lillies. With rock bands queuing up to revisit old albums, the junk-opera trio of Martyn Jacques, Adrian Stout and Adrian Huge have opted for a similar idea.

Their latest show dusts down some of the classic cautionary tales from their soundtrack to the Olivier Award-winning stage show Shockheaded Peter. If it not as shocking as it once was, it still has a frisson of nightmarish fun.

Inspired by the pre-Belloc scary fairy stories of German writer Heinrich Hoffman, falsetto-voiced Jacques and co conjure up a macabre world where children come to terrible ends for trifling misdemeanours. Fidgety Phil cannot keep still and bleeds to death. These days he would be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. As for Conrad, who keeps sucking his thumbs, the problem is swiftly solved by his thumbs being snipped off.

Last night’s show was slightly flat, despite a topical and typically sick start. Who else could get away with being introduced by a sneezing figure wearing a pig mask? One never exactly warms to this funereal outfit but on this occasion the Lillies never fully bloomed.

There were occasional flashes to their Tom Waits-influenced balladry, such as Adrian Huge’s percussion solo on pots and pans hanging from the heavens, yet this gig missed the full theatrics of the original stage hit.

In 2007 The Tiger Lillies delivered a disappointingly silly over-the-top performance at the Soho Theatre, before 2008’s punky burlesque outing at this venue won me over again. This current flashback is superior to the former, inferior to the latter. It was delightful to hear those deliciously deranged songs again but it would have been much nicer to hear something new.

Until 23 May (020 7478 0100, www.sohotheatre.com).