Fans of The Merry Wives of Windsor won’t want to miss this rare chance to see the effervescent, slightly post-Mozartean adaptation by Antonio Salieri, which premiered in 1799. According to an old canard of uncertain origin, Shakespeare wrote his sit-com at the behest of Queen Elizabeth, who fancied the notion of seeing “Sir John in love.” And while it’s no favorite at the playhouse, the premise of the Gargantuan old knight romancing two burghers’ wives for pleasure and profit has shown remarkable appeal to librettists and composers. By consensus, the third time was the charm, producing Giuseppe Verdi’s valedictory Falstaff (1893), one of the supreme masterpieces of the genre. But Ralph Vaughan Williams’s later Sir John in Love (1929), with its reedy Merrie England shimmer, has its charms as well, certainly to British audiences. And then there’s Otto Nicolai’s beautifully crafted Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849), rich in melody, gorgeously orchestrated, still popular in the regional houses of the German-speaking world. Salieri’s Sir John in Chicago is the lanky Christian Pursell, frequently cast to physical type as Carmen’s bullfighting squeeze Escamillo. Now you know why the gods of the theater invented fat suits. —Matthew Gurewitsch