A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
— John Keats

Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children’s Theatre in the West Loop to watch the opening production of their 20th season: a musical of Leo Lionni’s Frederick, a Caldecott Honor book from 1968, adapted by Suzanne Maynard Miller, with songs by Sarah Durkee & Paul Jacobs.

Shawn Pfautsch plays Earnest, a mouse and a clever engineer

Baby (Leslie Ann Sheppard), Earnest (Shawn Pfautsch), Nellie (Ellie Duffey)
and Sunny (Tina Muñoz Pandya) rescue Frederick (Brandon Acosta)
while Chipmunk (Jeremy Weinstein) plays keyboards

The show opens with a simple but charming set by Collette Pollard depicting a scaled up grassy meadow. In the back is a sardine can on its end containing a backlit backdrop which scrolls sideways to elegantly depict the changing seasons. Here then we encounter five mice, frolicking in the sun, until a nervous mouse called Nelly (natch!) sniffs a nip in a new breeze coming from the North, signifying the changing of the seasons. The falling of the first leaf sends the mice into a panic as they scatter. Their plans changed, they rush to gather food to hoard in their hideaway, so that they might survive the freezing winter.

Leslie Ann Sheppard plays Baby Mouse

All of them, that is, save one: Frederick. A daydreamer and an aesthete, Frederick is so enamored by the beauty in everything he sees and hears that he cannot focus on food collection. His family is understandably chafed by his shirking of his responsibilities but leaves him alone until Nelly, in a moment of rage and resentment, snaps. Frederick runs away hurt just as the snow starts to fall and loses his way, unable to find the hideout (“Oh no!”, whispered the child sitting next to me).

Ellie Duffey plays Nellie the nervous mouse

In creating Frederick, Leo Lionni updates the classic Aesop fable The Ant and the Grasshopper for a more enlightened age. You know the story: The ant works hard to collect food while the grasshopper plays in the sun. Then, when winter comes, the ant is secure and well-fed while the grasshopper starves. Lionni smartly uses this framework to make a case for aestheticism and the importance of art. As the mice search for Frederick in increasingly frigid conditions (Child: “It’s all Nelly’s fault!”) and almost give up hope before miraculously locating him (Child: “Yay!”). It’s a sweet depiction of inclusion. Once safe and warm, Frederick’s “supplies” prove crucial to the survival of the colony through the winter, arguing for the appreciation of art as a vital part of life.

Baby Mouse (Leslie Ann Sheppard)

Director/Choreographer Tommy Rapley does a fine job with Miller’s sharp script, and the songs are wonderfully catchy with sprightly arrangements by musical director Matthew Muñiz. The lighting design by Jason Lynch & Josiah Croegaert and costumes by Mieka van der Ploeg are also well ahead of the grade curve. The costumes are particularly witty; all the mouse parts—ears, paws, tails—are crocheted.

Rockin’ rodents Earnest (Shawn Pfautsch) and Chipmunk (Jeremy Weinstein)

Sunny (Tina Muñoz Pandya), Earnest (Shawn Pfautsch),
Nellie (Ellie Duffey) and Chipmunk (Jeremy Weinstein)

The multi-instrumentalist actor-muso cast is uniformly charming with Ellie Duffey as a standout as the neurotic worrywart, Nelly.

Children’s theatre is a strange beast. In one sense, it’s much more difficult to pull off successfully, being that it has to entertain without being condescending, to educate without lecturing, and to charm without being cloying. When it works, as it does here, it seems effortless. I could have done without the pre-show lesson on theatre etiquette—I’ve been to multiple shows this year where the audience was far less well-behaved—but by every metric, Leo Lionni’s Frederick is a success.

I may have walked into that theatre a middle-aged crank but I left it grinning from ear to ear.

Winter is coming.

photos by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux inc.

Leo Lionni’s Frederick
Chicago Children’s Theatre, 100 S. Racine St., in Chicago’s West Loop
75 minutes
ends on November 16, 2025
for tickets, visit Chicago Children’s Theatre