THEATER REVIEW: “A Christmas Story: The Musical” at the Chicago Theatre ★★★½ Toward the end of “A Christmas Story, The Musical” you hear a small catch in the throat of the fine actor Gene Weygandt, who plays Jean Shepherd, the raconteur who gave the American Christmas its Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun. You immediately get what he’s saying without actually saying: these memories of an imperfect, and thus perfect, Northwest Indiana lower-middle-class childhood of the 1940s are receding. The dad who struggled to come up with six bucks for a battery for the Olds; the mom who knew how to make any kid eat: These parents are now as dead as the narrator’s 9-year-old self, when happiness was just the chance to shoot your eye out.

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‘Christmas Story’: Ralphie sings, lamps dance, a mother loves