If the folks at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre have anything to do with it, the Big Bad Wolf will lose his reputation as a skulking, salivating carnivore, ready to devour anything that moves. The lead character in “Three,” a new show at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in Central Park, has young children eating out of his paws as he whimpers about his notoriety. “Oh, why did my parents have to give me such an evil name?” he howls to the audience. “If people just got to know me, they’d see that I’m not really a bad wolf.”

And so the stage is set for a puppet show that recasts three traditional fairy tales as vignettes about a good guy clearing his name. Playwright Jeff Borkin, 28, whose abilities became apparent as a young staff writer for Nickelodeon’s “Blue’s Clues,” was tapped to take on the challenge. “This show was definitely a tricky one because a lot of kids are scared of the Big Bad Wolf and we had the potential to lose the audience,” said Mr. Borkin. “The script became a story in simple terms about not giving up, that being good isn’t easy, but if you stick with it, the benefits are worthwhile.”

In Mr. Borkin’s telling, the Three Blind Mice are transformed into a trio of glamorous, ballad-belting Fairy God Mice, who put the Wolf through his paces to prove his goodness. In the “Three Little Pigs,” problems ensue when the houses the Wolf has built don’t hold up to a little huff and puff from the audience. In the second story, “The Three Bears,” he wolfs down the family’s porridge and unintentionally mangles the furniture. With one more chance left, the Fairy God Mice send him over to “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” where his further bumbling leads the sad sack to beg for yet another chance.

Creating the puppets was as challenging as recasting the fables, if not more so, said master puppeteer Addis Williams. While it took Mr. Borkin a mere two months to write the script, Mr. Williams toiled at building the 15 marionettes in the city’s Washington Heights puppet workshop, affectionately dubbed the Highbridge Dungeon, for seven months. Starting with a pencil drawing, Mr. Williams sketched what he thought the characters should look like; then the horse-trading between the staff began. “Bruce Cannon, the artistic director, came to me with a picture of Beyonce and said that’s the way the mice should appear, with breasts and high heels,” he explained. And since the marionettes use body gestures and mannerisms instead of a moveable jaw to communicate, Mr. Williams’s task became even more arduous, with added joints and complex rope controls attached to 50-pound fishing line.

The puppeteers themselves don’t speak, either. The script, music, and sound effects are pre-recorded so that the puppeteers can concentrate on moving the complex marionettes around the stage without entanglements. The marionettes’ personalities are conveyed through painted details and costuming. “The tilt of an eye or an eyebrow can make a puppet look friendly or menacing,” Mr. Williams explained. “With kids, we have to be very careful.”

All that care seems to pay off. Children and their families have been packing the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre for 31 years. The sweet, 19th-century pine-and-cedar chalet, which sits just beyond the West 79th Street path for Central Park’s runners and bikers, originally served as a schoolhouse in Sweden and was gifted to America in 1876 for the American Centennial Fair in Philadelphia. When the fair closed, the Swedish Cottage was bought by New York and used as an office, library, and nature study center. In 1973, the cottage was turned into the city’s marionette theater, refurbished in the early 1970s, and again in 1997, when central heat and air-conditioning were added, along with upgraded theatrical lighting and sound systems.

Without a marquee, the cottage is still a secret to many, some of whom discover it by word of mouth or when their children are invited to a marionette birthday party. The Cottage includes a separate party room with retired puppets decorating the walls and child-size furniture, appropriately donated by Swedish design retailer Ikea. Each marionette show plays for just two years; the first year within the theater, followed by a traveling tour throughout the city. Since opening last month, “Three” has received accolades from its core audience. At the end of the show, the Wolf asks the children if he’s done a good job of proving his virtue. Shouts and applause and little ones jumping off their seats is the happy ending everyone wants.