La Compagnie du Hanneton’s latest show The Toad Knew packed the house of the Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, Chicago’s brand new theater on Navy Pier. People came to see this 90-minute captivating and morose fairy tale that blended Thierrée’s dadaesque vision with an Oscar Wilde cum Dickensian steampunk aesthetic. The entire production has a dreamlike quality, from the lush and alive seeming velvet curtain to the bizarrely anthropomorphized apparatus and rigging that expanded, shook, twirled and contracted to allow a sort of fairy spider with a heart light to descend occasionally to interact with the humans. Of course, she may have been just one of the human gang, because The Toad Knew leaves a lot up to individual interpretation, a fact which some theater-goers were visibly not at ease with. It was the show’s weakness as well as its strength. The Toad Kne...