Taking children to see a musical that isn’t a Disney tent pole and yet still entertains with the heart and ambition to shape minds is a rare find. Lyricist and librettist Keni Fine, and composer Tony Small, have mounted a real gem at the Davenport Theatre, “Endangered: The Musical”—a production that is both compulsively entertaining and ecologically friendly, set in New York City with all the emerald splendor of a zoological Oz.

In the annals of assassinated political figures, presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., comprise the Mount Rushmore of tragic endings to America’s favorite sons.