Hiking With Johnny Appleseed, Theatre-Hikes, at North Park Village Nature Center and Washington Park. There’s much worth learning about the man behind the folklore: adapter-director Lara Filip’s 100-minute musical tribute, performed as a “theater hike” through assorted nature preserves, re-creates with love and imagination Johnny Appleseed’s inspirational life. Did you know that some of the apple trees John Chapman planted 150 years ago are still bearing fruit? Or that even before he died of exposure in 1845, at the age of 69, he’d become a living legend, notorious for going barefoot, wearing a pot on his head, and never using a gun? But his real accomplishment was planting apple trees over a 100,000-square-mile territory that included Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and his native Pennsylvania. And Theatre-Hikes proves its devotion by planting a tree at each performance.
