Kailey Ackermann, Ben Holmes, Sarah Lounsberry, Noel Huntley, and Cole Harksen in Into the Woods

You know those earworms you get when you can’t get a song out of your head no matter how you try? That happened to me several weeks ago after listening to the soundtrack from the Broadway hit Hamilton. My earworms were so intense that I had difficulty falling asleep, and I would elicit strange looks from people in the grocery aisles as I was unknowingly singing “My Shot” out loud. But the cure was found by my attending Quad City Music Guild’s Into the Woods on July 7, and this brilliant send-up, with its quirky, witty songs, wiped out my old earworms without creating new ones.

Jack Theiling and Ben Klocke in Lyle the Crocodile

Moving into a Victorian brownstone in the heart of New York City would be an adventure in itself, but imagine moving in and finding a full-grown crocodile in the bathroom. This is the start of a series of events in director Andrea Moore's Lyle the Crocodile, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's latest family musical. Being familiar with author Bernard Waber's 1960s picture books on which this show is based, I feared the production would be too baby-ish for my “sophisticated” eight-year-old granddaughter Ava. But she consented to attend the June 25 performance with me, and afterward we agreed that the story was appealing to both elementary-school-age children and their parents. She did, however, point out that kids may have to know a little about Lyle's time and place (New York City in the 1950s), and about its references to turning crocs into purses and shoes, which she informed me was now illegal.