Review: At Chicago Children’s Theatre’s 'Beatrix Potter Drive-In,’ the pint-sized people in the back seat get their due
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For all her tattle, Mrs. Tittlemouse knew not of the coronavirus pivot. Peter Rabbit was famously disinclined toward social distancing. And Mr. Jeremy Fisher, an amphibian, was always far too slippy-sloppy to wear a mask.
(I heard people tried, and his spirit was willing, but frogs have to work with what they are given.)
Nonetheless, the most beloved characters of the British children’s author Beatrix Potter were present Friday night in the West Loop as the Chicago Children’s Theatre attempted a drive-in version of one of its most popular usual attractions.
Granted, the target demographic was far more likely to be in a car seat than behind the wheel. But most of the hired drivers, distinguished by grins, bags under the eyes and yet a willingness to shake a pompom or two, were visibly glad to abandon their basements and their tyrannical screens and act as chauffeurs for a generation blissfully too young for their moods to be much darkened by the current malaise.
What a tonic was all this family fun on a bit of urban asphalt, far smaller than your typical field of celluloid dreams but doing the job, nonetheless.
Much effort had been made to make this more than an outdoor filmed version of a show, although that was the core attraction. There were live musicians, including a cellist, Sonia Goldberg, as well as Teddy Grahams cookies, actors flitting among the exhaust pipes and even a few live scenes illuminated in a see-through part of the building’s lobby. At the end of a tough week of news, you didn’t need to be a little kid to find all of this most, well, maybe normalizing is the best word. Even the bathrooms were open.
The director, Will Bishop, and the main actors, Lara Carling, Kay Kron and Ray Rehberg, had gotten together in June, I was told, and carefully filmed the show in a socially distanced way, which involved multiple takes and masks for anyone not speaking. The piece is a fusion of puppets and live theater and it looked great on the 30-foot screen attached the wall outside the theater. Sound was to be enjoyed, drive-in fashion, on your car radio, which is less than ideal in an urban setting, perhaps, but it did the job. Honesty forces me to report that not all the audience stayed awake for the entire, hour-long show. But for many parents, that blessed transition surely was better than any standing ovation.
Patrons backed their vehicles into one of a couple of dozen stalls where police cruisers once parked outside this former police station, and either pulled out folding chairs or sat on the lip of their tailgates. “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” the most famous of the Potter stories, was written in 1893 but it has proven transcendent of its era and, when you think about it, Potter’s personification of animals proved highly influential on what we came to think of as children’s entertainment in the century that followed.
Now here we all are in a very different moment, and yet Potter’s frisky characters remain able to draw a crowd. See, not everything has fallen apart.
Patience. Perseverance. Pleasure.
“The Beatrix Potter Drive-In Experience” plays through Nov. 1 at Chicago Children’s Theater, 100 S. Racine Ave. For tickets or more information, call 312-374-8835 or visit chicagochildrenstheatre.org.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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