BROADWAY TO BIG D: Dallas Morning News theater critic Lawson Taitte has been in New York the past week or so compiling his semi-annual Broadway roundup. Among the shows he’s taken in are the movie-to-stage musicals Billy Elliot and Shrek and the soon-to-be-closed Thirteen. Before reading his reviews, can you guess which one of those three he didn’t care for?

The one characteristic those three shows share is that they are family-friendly, a trend Taitte also wrote about on Sunday. He talked to Dallas Summer Musicals president Michael Jenkins, and it sounds like that trend has trickled down to what we’ll be seeing at Fair Park Music Hall — as Jerome noted here when the new season was announced in September. (Jenkins has “vacuumed up a lot of the available material, especially of the ‘family friendly’ sort.”) As the story notes, families tend to buy twice as many tickets to a single show as the average subscriber.

BARACK FOR KIDS: It was bound to happen — a Barack Obama book for kids. What’s cool about this one, though, is that it was written and illustrated by a pair of locals. The words come from University Park’s Jonah Winter while the pictures are courtesy of AG Ford, who grew up in Garland and now lives in University Park. DFW.com profiled Ford on Sunday, who admits the he gets caught up in tracking the book’s sales.

“I’m trying to stay away from looking at how the book is doing,” Ford tells DFW.com. “But I’m obsessed with checking it on the Internet.”

When he looks up the numbers, he’s likely to be pleased: it hit No. 6 on The New York Times best-sellers list of children’s books. When inauguration day roles around, don’t be surprised if it spikes again.