Another Snowy Day With Beatrix Potter and Friends With Another Snowy Day, Will Bishop and Chicago Children’s Theatre have crafted a winter puppet show extravaganza that’s dazzling, brisk at under an hour, and sweet as can be. It’s based on three of Beatrix Potter’s animal stories, handsomely woven together by three actors who can do it all: They animate Peter Rabbit and his companions (one a ginormous fish) with beauty and dexterity. And they provide musical accompaniment on many instruments and sing in harmony. With their help, the beloved stories are brought to life with such joy that the finely realized puppets (designed by Grace Needlman) genuinely seem to laugh, cry, and speak. This is excellent children’s theater. If you have babies, take them—they’ll love it. If you are a baby, I’m very impressed with your reading skills and you should go: you’ll love it. If you don’t have babies, go make some! They’ll love it! —Max Maller
First Lady Suite Composer-librettist Michael John LaChiusa’s artful chamber opera probes the privileges and pressures of being a presidential wife in a trio of inventive vignettes. One episode focuses on Jackie Kennedy from the perspective of her disgruntled, overworked secretary as the women wait aboard Air Force One before arriving in Dallas on a fateful November day in 1963; another finds inebriated Mamie Eisenhower fantasizing about a trip with black opera singer Marian Anderson to rouse Ike to action in the Arkansas school integration crisis; the third imaginatively explores the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and lesbian journalist Lorena Hickock, whose passionate devotion to Eleanor is only ambiguously reciprocated. LaChiusa’s complex, challenging score is well delivered by a very fine ensemble under the guidance of director Nicholas Reinhart and musical director Nick Graffagna in this adventurous Circle Theatre production. —Albert Williams
Moon Shot: A Race to Space Theater Unspeakable’s latest project tells the story of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing through a nonlinear narrative that moves back and forth in time, from Neil Armstrong’s boyhood play to the end of his marriage to his monumental step on the moon’s surface. Mark Frost and his troupe have developed a singular style that places seven actors on a 21-foot platform, where the story is told through an immersive, mutable physical language, bodies morphing and shifting elegantly and collectively, offering moments with historical figures like John F. Kennedy, Russian astronaut Yuri Gargarin, and German rocket builder Wernher von Braun. There’s an impressive emphasis on the women who were trained to go to space but denied the opportunity, as well as on the many female mathematicians behind the scenes at NASA who were crucial to making this happen. A Chicago Children’s Theatre production, the show’s aimed at kids ten and over. —Suzanne Scanlon
Singin’ in the Rain Tammy Mader has choreographed some sweet bits for this version of the 1983 stage musical based on the celebrated movie. The sequence set to “Gotta Dance” is a particularly big, bright deal, and the tapping overall is sharp. As good as Mader, director William Brown, and the cast are, though, they haven’t solved an essential problem: the original—an MGM-produced tale of silent screen stars dealing with the advent of talkies—remains unforgettable. The 1952 celluloid performances by Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds haunt each scene and song here. In fact, Brown and Mader abet the haunting (what choice do they have?) by duplicating the film’s classic moments, from the upset sofa in “Good Morning” to, of course, the deluge in the title number. You leave the theater humming the tunes, sure enough, but also wondering why you didn’t simply stream the movie. —Tony Adler
