I am not a theater critic but I have been devoted to covering theater since my early 1980s reports on the explosion of Chicago storefront theaters for National Public Radio. On The Mara Tapp Show in the 1990s, I was honored to host weekly conversations about and offer scenes from some of Chicago’s best shows, and delighted when those interviews filled houses for our local theaters.
In 2015, at the request of friends, I started a series of emails with recommendations for shows I thought worthy of patrons. Some years later, actors, directors and publicity people in Chicago’s theater world prevailed on me to share these raves, a request I accepted, especially in light of the increasing tensions in the theater world and need to keep Chicago theaters healthy. Read more…
Find out what the critics think at the Review Round-up on the website of TheatreInChicago.com.
Breaking News
Don’t miss your chance to support Chicago theater, dance and artists while you’re saving money! Chicago Theatre Week is underway with lots of good deals on plays and performances on many Chicago stages. It runs through February 15, and Chicago Theatre Week Continued goes from February 16-22. This drama festival comes courtesy of the League of Chicago Theaters. Check out the list of plays and participating theaters at https://www.choosechicago.com/chicago-theatre-week/ Get tickets at Chicago Theatre Week – Hot Tix.
The League has many offerings for Black History Month. Find them at Cultural Happenings: Black History Month – Chicago Plays Black Arts & Culture Alliance of Chicago will present a free Town Hall Discussion: Chicago’s Black Arts Organizations…What We Can Do on Monday, February 9, 2026 at the Black Ensemble Theater in association with Black Ensemble & the Goodman Theatre’s 100 Free Acts of Theatre. Reservations are required for this discussion, followed by a light reception. Get the details at Town Hall Discussion: Chicago’s Black Arts Organizations…What We Can Do – Goodman Theatre
Theater Raves has been renamed Raves to reflect the fact that I am now also raving about music performances and art exhibitions. Here’s to raves about all the arts!
I’ve stepped into the 21st Century and you can find my raves on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tappraves/. Please follow me to shine a spotlight on the excellent performing arts organizations and artists I am honored to cover.
Desirable Dance Preview
American Icons
Joffrey Ballet, Civic Opera House, February 19 through March 1
Dance grabbed me when I was four years old and my art-loving parents put me in a modern dance class. My passion for the medium deepened a couple years later during nine months spent in India when I learned Bharata Natyam, one of the country’s classical dance forms then in the early days of being revived. My love of dance continued into my preteen and teenage years in Chicago where I was fortunate to study with some wonderful teachers, and see fabulous performances of avant garde dance troupes with my parents in a bold new series. For all these reasons the prospect of another evening with the Joffrey, watching its precise and talented dancers breathe life into some of its classic ballets delights me.
It also reminds me of a highly amusing taxi ride I enjoyed with two giants of the arts world, then Cultural Commissioner Lois Weisberg and Gerald Arpino, who co-founded a groundbreaking dance company Robert Joffrey the year of my birth and was one of its first lead dancers, and Weisberg, a progressive, fierce advocate for the arts who, alas, became most famous for putting cows decorated by artists on Chicago streets. Both were in their last decade, and both had epic personalities. By the time we were in the back seat of that cab, I was old enough to know that those in the arts have private lives, often radically different from their public persons, but the interaction between these two delighted me with its unexpected bantering. Their conversation turned into a comic skit worthy of Second City as they caught up, traded gossip and war stories from the arts world and kibbitzed from downtown to the North side. I remember thinking that I was a lucky fly on a taxi window, witnessing two visionary leaders, each so very human in the way they teased and felt at ease with each other.
I will be remembering that ride as I watch the Joffrey’s new show, American Idols, paying special attention to Mr. Arpino’s Kettentanz with music by Johann Strauss and Johan Mayer, which one New York critic called “his loveliest ballet.” As if that’s not enough there are pieces by Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and Mr. Joffrey. I suspect it will be another magical evening.
Theater Raves
The Dance of Death
Steppenwolf Theatre Company through March 22
Highly Recommended
It began as a joke: “Do you want to see some August Strindberg to cheer you up?” I asked friends, quickly adding, “Who actually wants to see Strindberg?” especially these days. I was wrong. Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s The Dance of Death is the funniest Strindberg you’ll likely ever experience and it will probably cheer you up. Imagine a Strindberg play that makes you laugh. This one does with a take on the Swedish playwright you’ve never seen before. Call it Strindberg meets Second City with a spritz of Vaudeville that comes together in a welcome comic cocktail.
While it’s true that Steppenwolf artists love family dramas – as long as the families are dysfunctional – they often favor more contemporary dramas. Enter Irish Playwright Conor McPherson. One could argue that seeing Strindberg through McPherson’s lens is modern given his reinvention of this 1900 play.
Whatever the case, it offers Jeff Perry at his funniest as Captain, an actor made new with humor. Gone is the man who inhabited memorable roles in famous Steppenwolf shows like Anna Christie, A Steady Rain, The Grapes of Wrath and August: Osage County. Perry is newly minted from the start in the opening exchange with his wife Alice. He is horrified when she tells him they have no wine, telling her they’ll need to stock up for their upcoming Silver Anniversary celebrations.
Alice: You really want to celebrate that?
Captain: Well of course I do. Don’t you?
Alice: I thought we might show more decorum by keeping our long miserable mistake to
ourselves.
Captain: Oh come, Alice! We’ve had fun. (Pauses) Now and then. And soon it will be all
over. We’ll be dead, and all that’s left is your rotten carcass. And all that it’s good for is to fertilize
cabbages.
Alice: So we go through all of this just for the sake of cabbages?
Captain: Listen, I don’t make the rules.
It wouldn’t be right to give all the credit to McPherson or Perry since Director Yasen Peyankov’s Bulgarian fingerprints are all over it. Peyankov can be deliciously funny on stage. That’s saying a lot. One of my favorite roles was his drunken butler in Steppenwolf’s first Shakespeare play, its 2009 The Tempest, and that’s saying a lot since he shared the stage with many stellar Steppenwolf colleagues including the late Frank Galati, whose heartbreakingly brilliant Prospero inaugurated a refreshing read on the reasons for the magician’s isolation and revenge that illuminated and reinvented the role, and Jon Michael Hill as an electric and captivating Ariel who reached new heights literally as he roamed the universe of that set. Fortunately Peyankov’s comic sense translates to his directing, and here he shows us the connection between the oppressive fatalism of his native country – or, for that matter, the former Soviet Union – and Strindberg’s Sweden, and perhaps even some of its snowy neighbors where artistic musings on death accompanied by morbid humor are not uncommon but rather a means of survival.
That wicked humor is also applied to aging, a constant concern for the Captain and his wife. It’s refreshing to see this subject, so fraught on these shores with the American obsession with youth, treated the way my friends in their eighties and nineties and I do.
It’s also a treat that every person involved on the directing and acting side of this show is a member of Steppenwolf’s Ensemble. Perry’s Captain deftly alternates between existential hopelessness, bitterness at his failed career and marriage and scheming to avenge himself. Kathryn Erbe as Alice is the perfect foil, cold as ice and hot only when her cousin Kurt shows up and throws upends their marriage and lives. Erbe manages to bring out the nuances in a woman who could be seen as a cold calculating viper. Chamberlain’s Kurt captures the mix of his characters tortured and impassioned personality with skill.
Collette Pollard’s set, which I will not spoil by revealing, other than to say it is a cross between a castle tower and Château d’If, where the Count of Monte Cristo spent six solitary years, is appropriately lovely and haunting. Ana Kuzmanic’s costumes are period-perfect and enhance the dramatic trio’s personalities. Lee Fiskness’ lighting gets all the moods of this overcast play right.
So, if you like you Strindberg with a splash of Second City or want a real Chicago experience or simply need some good laughs, don’t miss The Dance of Death. It will cheer you up or, at least, make you chortle while you contemplate love and life.
Confederates
Shenise Brown in Confederates (Left)
Photos by Aaron Reese Boseman.
Redtwist Theatre through 3-8
Highly Recommended
Dominique Morisseau’s plays always grab me with their truth, beauty and wit. That was the case with The Detroit Project, her trio of plays – Paradise Blue, Detroit ’67, Skeleton Crew – as well as Sunset Baby and Pipeline, each beautifully done by Northlight Theatre, TimeLine Theatre Company and Victory Gardens Theater between 2013 and 2019. Redtwist Theatre’s production of Confederates persuaded me that it may be Morisseau’s best play for its juxtaposition of a life nearly destroyed by the American sin of slavery with another mired in the challenges and obstacles contemporary Blacks endure. It was therefore reassuring to discover in Morrisseau’s Author’s Note that she considers this play different from all her others.
A compelling piece, Confederates offers linked tales of two women. One is a political scientist revered for her scholarship, high standards for her students and active use of intelligence to combat institutional racism. The other is a spirited slave with spunk, smarts, sass and an ability to survive her abuses as she fights for her freedom. The play opens with the sharply dressed professor displaying a disturbing photo of a Black woman nursing a white baby. This scholar, Sandra, carefully notes that she is neither “averse” to nor “embarrassed” or “fatigued” by “images of slavery.” She watched all of Roots at her “mother’s insistence” – “her idea of summer vacation” – she explains before reciting a litany of her willing encounters with the history and experience of slavery. Her monologue ends with Sandra’s demand that an investigation be launched to determine who put this photo on her office door. Next, we are transported to a slave cabin inhabited by Sara, who is busy stitching up her brother’s wound while they debate their relative status – hers as a slave and his as an escapee who’s joined the Union Army. The connection between Sandra and Sara will emerge over the course of Confederates.
Mind you this is not a tiresomely “woke” play. Its beauty lies in Morrisseau’s ability to reveal and challenge every aspect and nuance of these two women’s lives, every form of privilege, discrimination, racism, sexism and classism and, indeed, of our America. She is fierce in her examinations, and she is funny about it. That balance between humor and tragedy is authentic and genius. “Sometimes existing in the middle of racism, sexism, classism, and the insanity of it all is like living in a farce,” Morrisseau notes.
Pulling this off requires excellent acting and directing. The Confederates crew has both. Aaron Reese Boseman deftly directs an exquisite cast. Monique Marshaunportrays Sandra with all the toughness she needs, and with a sophisticated understanding of the many conflicts and overlaps in dogma and ideology. She is a marvel and a joy to watch. Shenise Brownbrings the same skills to Sara who, though lacking an Ivy League degree – how could she have one? She’s a slave! – is canny, resourceful, skilled at hiding her talents and playing people off each other. The other three actors inhabit double roles, which sometimes seem twinned and, under Morrisseau’s pen, bring out the complexities of their characters and what they face. Makari Robinson-McNeesen is equally fine as a smart but challenging student of Sandra’s and as Sara’s adoring and extremely brave brother. Madelyn Loehr plays Sara’s plantation mistress in deliciously evil Gone-with-the-Wind fashion and is ideal as Sandra’s federal work study assistant who acknowledges her white privilege but manages to be simultaneously clueless about it. Toccara Castlemanis more than believable as a calculating slave perhaps due to her abuse and excellent as Sandra’s manipulative and tough colleague.
Marquecia Jordan’s costumes fit each character perfectly from Sandra’s stylish jackets, shirts and slacks to the Gone-with-the-Wind plaid hoop skirt and matching bonnet of Sara’s mistress. Nick Barletson’s props are lift the story from the Civil War rifled musket to sticky notes. Kevin Rolfs’ set nicely transitions from Sandra’s office to Sara’s slave cabin with a shelf, chair and table that, like the actors, play dual roles.Quinn Chisenhall’schoice to have Sara’s quarters dimly lit could be in keeping with the time and slave poverty or it could be a metaphor for the absence of the light of liberty. Sandra’s bright office offers the contrast of the illumination that comes with education.
This is a play about Black women trying to control their destiny, and about self-preservation or, one could argue, survival. “I trust you to find the laughter, the profundity, the rage, and the heart,” Dominique Morriseau urges directors and actors in her Author’s Note. “Let’s make art and get free…” I would say the same to audiences about this play that examines morality and reality. Don’t miss Confederates. It has much to say to us now.
Birds of North America
A Red Orchid Theatre through March 15
Highly Recommended
As Leo Tolstoy famously said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The beauty of the father-daughter relationship in Birds of North America is that they and their family fall between these opposites – as do most of us in our familial relationships.
The story here is about an extremely intelligent father and daughter who love and regularly wound each other with brilliant, biting jabs. The play starts with the Caitlyn’s desire to bond with John over his beloved birding. What follows is a decade of generational discord, dismay about the disappearance of the bird species that become the proverbial canaries in coal mines of climate change, accompanied by debates on how to live. He wants to save the world. She wants to save herself. To be fair, Caitlyn lives in the uncertain economy of those in their twenties and thirties.
And yet father and daughter are deeply connected by their belief in science, their intelligence and offbeat irreverent humor. What could be pedantic isn’t thanks to Playwright Anna Ouyang Moench’s script, which gives us two people we can really care about who also challenge us with their smarts and problems. Red Orchid Artistic Director Kirsten Fitzgerald, herself a brilliant, fierce actor in many shows, brings that script to life with the help of two talented actors.
I was ready to see this show because of the excellence of Chicago Veteran John Judd, a favorite on many stages, and Cassidy Slaughter-Mason, impressive in several roles. What a joy to watch these talents coalesce into a show that focuses on thoughtful people about whom you really care. Judd gives us a man who is uncompromising in his dedication to improving the world. He makes us feel John’s iconoclastic inflexibility, and the way that his values eclipse compassion and block the human side of his quest in medical science. When John describes a snowy owl a friend saw that he regrets missing, his daughter says maybe he will get a chance someday and he notes that it’s unlikely given global warming. When she agrees and says that’s depressing, he tells her, “It’s the end of the world. It should be depressing.” When she tries to offer support for his work, he snaps, “This isn’t about me. It’s about contributing something to the world.” Slaughter-Mason portrays that daughter as a young woman who respects what her father is trying to do but is clear-eyed about his human failures, and adept at navigating their interpersonal messiness. She’s especially fine at showing Caitlyn’s frustration with her father through expressive face and body movements. The interplay between the two of them is lovely to behold and very authentic. Even though Caitlyn’s mother is never on onstage, her presence in the lives of her husband and daughter, as they discuss her and her unflagging support for her husband’s work, makes her seem like a full-fledged character. The presence of climate change, and John’s continuing and passionate concern about it, is critical here. How refreshing to see two smart people face such a major issue as they try to connect emotionally, to see lives lived with the very issues that challenge us. Morgan Laszlo’s realistic back porch with its suburban lawn furniture and flagstones provides ideal support for everything that takes place here.
The Brilliant Redhead was eavesdropping on the way out and almost every audience member she overheard made a connection with a personal story. Indeed, this play reminded me of my beloved and inspiring but demanding parents. I joke that they started each day asking us how we would make the world better. My husband and I tried to model such behavior rather than insisting that our children regularly practice it but, indeed, they are making the world better, a pride point for any parent. Some of the plays we’ve seen about families offer endings that begin to heal dysfunction, the Brilliant Redhead noted. Here there is no such catharsis, which I argue lends authenticity, but there is love, humor and a genuine attempt to understand and forgive each other. That human connection is huge and makes Birds of North America a poignant and essential piece of theater for any of us who have complicated family relationships. And isn’t that really most of us?
Eureka Day
TimeLine Theatre Company with Broadway in Chicago through February 22
Highly Recommended
Even though it won the 2025 Tony, I’ll admit to being a bit nervous about seeing a play revolving around parents at a fancy private California school as they grapple with issues of quarantine. I feared it would be an evening of entitled, self-absorbed liberals who make your hemorrhoids hurt. Eureka Day erased my concerns almost immediately like the ideal No. 2 pencil with its wit, timeliness and depth.
Welcome to the progressive-to-the-point-of-being-irritating Eureka Day School. It is ideally located in Berkeley, and it embraces inclusiveness to the degree that its governing entity does everything by consensus. All is nirvana until a child gets mumps and liberal values are tested by reality – so often the way to break them, and reveal ugly truths. What follows is an epic battle about the value of vaccines, what personal freedom really means and how to cope with viral misinformation. The highlight is the scene in which the school’s Executive Committee takes the matter to the parents in what turns out to be its misguided effort to be inclusive. Without giving too much away, technology presents obstacles, not the least of them the parents’ Zoom meeting comments that are like so many online expressions i.e. unfettered by etiquette or kindness and full of hateful vile comments. Anyone who’s ever read online comments – BOT or not – knows what I mean.
But those comments are hilarious since Playwright Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is, after all, a satire about parenting, personal liberties and differing perspectives. An especially savory moment is when commission members recall setting the school’s dramatic adaptation of the classic Peter Pan in outer space to avoid insulting any racial, ethnic or gender group. Eureka Day is also a play of incomplete sentences because the five parents on the Executive Committee either cut each other off in their need to dominate and express themselves or don’t know what they are saying and can’t complete a sentence in their search for the perfect woke words. Pauses are critical here. Such interactions require exquisite timing. These five actors have it, and they are expertly directed by Lili-Anne Brown, a South-side native with acting and directing experience. Sometimes that makes a play better; sometimes it doesn’t. Here it’s a plus apparent in Brown’s and the actors’ ability to make Spector’s script snap.
PJ Powers, long TimeLine’s artistic director and a regular on its stages, is ideal as the earnest, well-meaning committee chair who would love nothing more than the contentment of harmonious consensus, especially if there are some good business practices behind it. Rebekah Ward strikes a fine balance by embracing the squishiness of laid-back yet politically correct California parenting with a calm and seemingly sweet demeaner that hides a control-freak with a sad story and the stereotypical less-than-liberal views. Jürgen Hooper is persuasive as her closest ally and a stay-at-home dad who can never quite say what he means but manages to derail everyone else with his interruptions. Aurora Adachi-Winter starts as a straight-ahead mother who is quickly unhinged by the situation. Fortunately, the newest commission member, and the only Black one, emerges as the single person with a clear grasp of the science, and the best way to address this situation. Gabrielle Lott-Rogers plays her to perfection, calm and compassionate but tough.
Lucie Greene’s school library is a spot-on set with its shelves of children’s books and diminutive, cheerful primary-colored furniture. Janelle Smith’s costumes match each character’s personality while stroking their stereotypes.
What could be a slight satire with cardboard characters evolves into something more as the dramatic corps grapples with hard issues such as whose perspective is right, how to keep their children safe and the value of expertise. These are not new debates nor ones that will disappear so it’s no surprise that Eureka Day was written in 2018 or that it remains timely. Lest you think me conservative or liberal, let me explain that dogma in any form alarms me. I’ve embraced equality of all sorts, transparency and expertise long before “politically correct,” “woke” or “false news” became part of our language. I deplore the erasure of history, preferring to teach our children about the good and the bad, and to be honest about racism, sexism and other evils. The Black Art-loving friend who accompanied me to this show shares those values and happens to work in the world of education. We laughed our way through Eureka Day even as we appreciated its exploration of the limits of being woke. This play is about the mess that happens when the best of intentions goes awry, as she noted, and the characters do hash it out in the best democratic ways. We were delighted that it manages to move beyond the headlines and catch phrases to actually examine issues with humor, giving us much to talk about. Don’t miss it.
Musical Homage
Remembering Tom Lehrer
I was about 11 when Tom Lehrer jumped into my consciousness and stole my intellectual heart.
I’ll blame it on my parents who were crazy about this genius mathematician-turned-showman, the author of some of the wittiest satirical songs most of us had ever encountered. We spent many a night after family dinner wearing out the vinyl on Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was. By the time I was12 I knew all the lyrics on that album, and a couple other well-worn records by Tom Lehrer. For true Lehrer devotees, picking a favorite song is impossible but singing as many as possible as often as possible is impossible to resist – much to the annoyance of non-Lehrer fans or other sorts of American Puritans he would most certainly eschew. Fortunately, my parents were far from that, and I had the good luck to marry a man who happily sang Lehrer along with me, though he was usually in key. So Lehrer’s late July death at 97 hit me with enough of a smack that it’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts, and to trace his impact on my life.
In my junior year of high school, my mother was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard Law School, an opportunity she happily accepted for many reasons, not least among them that she’d not been able to accept the full scholarship Radcliffe offered her because her parents couldn’t afford to send her across the country for college. Already a surly teenager, I was eager to escape the irritating pretensions of the University of Chicago, where the administration often made racist and other horrible decisions that eclipsed the good work and politics of my parents and their friends and colleagues. My parents took the view that while the Hyde Park neighborhood had some merits and lots of smart and wonderful people, it also possessed a cloyingly small-town nature that required true city folks like us to leave it often to explore the delights of Chicago, and to find decent restaurants. Given this, my adolescent spirit was prepared to dive into in the cosmopolitan charms of Cambridge and Boston. That disappeared as soon as I discovered that pretense and academic pedigrees were an art form at Harvard compared to the rumpled, multisyllabic, grumpy nature of your average U of C habitué or Hyde Parker.
The fact that I was sent to a “school for young ladies” in a Cambridge house did not improve my teenage outlook. However, one fact, and that school’s proximity to it, elated me. Tom Lehrer taught at Harvard and lived nearby. Call me naïve but, at 15, I thought the best way to meet him was to go to his house every day after school and sit on his steps in the hopes that he would emerge or come home after work whereupon I would express my admiration of his brilliant lyrics and fawn all over him. Weeks went by. This did not happen. Finally, one cold afternoon, the door opened and my heart leapt. A woman peered out and asked me why I was sitting on her porch every day. I explained that I wanted to meet Lehrer and asked if this wasn’t his house. Yes, she replied, but he had the good sense to go to Santa Cruz that winter and she was renting his house. Crestfallen, I went home and consoled myself with art. At that time, I intended to be a dancer and choreographer so I persuaded one of my two school friends, both also outliers, to join me in creating a dance to Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag.” Her Czech mother sewed our nuns’ habits from old pillowcases, and we used Mardi Gras beads that doubled as belts we could swing around and as rosaries.
We started performing our “Vatican Rag” around Cambridge. People seemed to like it, except for one woman who found it scandalous and turned to express her view to my father, who was sitting next to her. “That’s my daughter,” he said with some pride. He was a professor of humanities and religious studies among other subjects so I like to think that it was more than mere paternal pride.
The Cambridge grapevine, it turns out, was as good as the Hyde Park one. When Lehrer returned to Cambridge in the spring, word reached him that two girls were performing a dance to his “Vatican Rag” around town. Connections were made, and Lehrer came over to our house, singing and playing the piano while I performed our dance for him. His delight was contagious but not nearly as enormous as mine. My mother, herself delighted, filmed this encounter. Alas that ancient videocassette returned with me to Chicago only to become the one piece of my luggage the airlines have lost forever so all I have is the memory of that remarkable afternoon – and, of course, Lehrer’s glorious song.
I headed off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in the Fall but was so smitten with Lehrer that I managed to stay in touch with him. He was campaigning for George McGovern by singing at fundraisers, and the Twin Cities were on his tour. I got to spend an intoxicating evening following Lehrer around and watching him work his magic on crowds. By then, he’d performed on Sesame Street, singing adorable little ditties about “silent e” and its alphabetical relatives. He tickled the Twin Cities audiences by sharing the “Adult X-rated” version of “Silent E.”
As I’ve revisited his repertoire since his death, I’ve been struck by the giddy joys Lehrer’s lyrics cause in songs like “New Math” and “The Elements,” and the relevance of his lyrics in so many songs from “Pollution” to “Who’s Next?” Consider these from “National Brotherhood Week:”
Oh the white folks hate the Black folks
And the Black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks is an old established rule
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week …
It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise
As long as you don’t let them in your school
Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks…
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week
National Everyone-Smile-at-One-Another-hood Week
Be nice to people who are inferior to you
It’s only for a week so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year
I was moved to discover in the many odes to and obituaries to Lehrer that he decided to release the rights to all his songs, telling his fans, “So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” He even had a website created for people to download his songs.
No doubt that only expanded Lehrer’s following, as does his songs’ infectious singability, which has made me continue to sing Lehrer’s songs across so many decades whenever and wherever the spirit moves me, which is often. Our children grew up on Lehrer’s songs as well, and I am now introducing my grandbaby to his oeuvre. I’m sure she’ll enjoy the kiddie versions of his Sesame Street songs when she learns to read but, for now, we’re working our way through the age-appropriate highlights of his adult repertoire so she can decide what her favorite will be.