If you have a taste for the macabre, then Shockheaded Peter, from Black Button Eyes Productions, might very well be your jam. It’s got naughty children dying horribly, awful parents getting ...

Imagine pitching this idea: Teach children how to behave through a series of cautionary tales in which each young protagonist dies. In one a little girl plays with matches and burns to death. Then in ...

The world of Struwwelpeter is not a particularly safe place for kids. In the 1845 book of German fables by Heinrich Hoffmann, children suffer a horror movie’s worth of punishments for minor misdeeds.

The problem with Black Button Eyes' splendid revival of the irresistibly grim “Shockheaded Peter” at Chicago's Athenaeum Theatre is the length of the run. It's too short. To be sure, the musical's ...

Shockheaded Peter is the two-word answer to people who think that theatre has had its day. Described by its producer as 'a nineteenth-century pop-up video', it projects a dizzy mix of talents: the ...

For Company One, recreating “Shockheaded Peter” as it was originally produced would have proved impossible. The nightmarish musical, created by Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott in 1998, wickedly ...

Back in 1845, Heinrich Hoffman created a book of cautionary tales to teach his kids moral lessons. Those German stories, which often ended in the death of the misbehaving child, now provide the basis ...

If you invert the Victorian sentimentality of “Peter Pan,” recently brought to life as a musical about its creator called “Finding Neverland,” paint it black and add tongue-in-cheek references to the ...

Company One productions always feel more like rock ‘n’ roll shows than any other theater’s, even Oberon’s. It’s not only the relative youth of the audience, but the expectations in the air that what’s ...

Dr. Benjamin Spock must be spinning in his grave. Erasing decades of coddling, correct parenting in one fell swoop, "Shockheaded Peter" instead deals with naughty children by invoking the threat of ...