Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Other Treasured Stories For decades, starting in the late 1960s, Eric Carle used a distinctive collage technique to illustrate his books for young children, including the three staged here by the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia: The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; and Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me. Director/production designer Jim Morrow has done an impeccable job of expressing Carle’s aesthetic with puppets. All is bright, beautiful, winsome, and deft. But if you go, be warned: This really is a kids’ show. Adults can expect to get sweetly but certainly bored. Carle’s books teach pre-K subjects like counting and colors, after all, and the only crisis is the stomachache the caterpillar gets from eating too much. It would be different if, say, the bear had a bad debt, a fast car, and a handgun. But he doesn’t. —Tony Adler

Dylan Brody’s Driving Hollywood Given the effete stylings of Dylan Brody’s one-man show—leather-bound books and manual typewriter atop wooden writing desk, 1940s-style microphone, tweed suit with watch chain—and his easygoing efforts to depict his life story as series of a wry, insupportable encounters with moral cowards and intellectual inferiors, it’s no surprise the writer-performer bills himself as a humorist rather than, say, a comic. And at his best, as when he succinctly dissects the hypocrisy of American democracy by reliving his second-grade class election, he earns a bit of Will Rogers cred. But it’s never clear why his lifelong struggle to have his mildly subversive ideas taken seriously should matter to the rest of us, especially since he delivers nearly every anecdote in this 90-minute evening with more bemusement than urgency. —Justin Hayford

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: An IMAX Experience The sly premise of this new show from two-woman sketch duo Spooky Dookie (Claire McFadden and Maureen Monahan) provides an ample sandbox for absurdist comedy: wing by wing, a blaze slowly engulfs Chicago’s Field Museum as clueless audiences watch a documentary about a real-life fire. Between projected video shorts poking fun at the bombast of IMAX and the Field’s Sue-centric marketing, Monahan and McFadden dash between playing museum staff, visitors, and subjects in the documentary. Some sluggish transitions and circular jokes make the whole of this slight effort (it clocks in at less than an hour) less than the sum of its parts, but when Spooky Dookie are on, they’re on. Days later, I’m still laughing thinking about a sketch in which a representative for Bruce Rauner fights with an anthropologist over a skeleton the governor insists on eating. —Dan Jakes