CHICAGO—It took him five weeks to write what he envisioned as a ghost story, and that it starts as a frightening yarn may explain why Charles Dickens’s masterpiece “A Christmas Carol” has a rather gloomy opening. We know the story: The tale starts when we learn that Ebenezer Scrooge is very rich but his wealth…

When it first opened in 1993 at the Goodman Studio Theatre, the show was spectacular and now, almost three decades later, “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci” is still a wondrous, ingenious, whimsical, and stunning piece of theater. Adapted from the Renaissance man’s notebooks by Mary Zimmerman, who also directs the 90-minute show, aspects of…