For the third mainstage production in its 2017-18 season, Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, from March 28 through May 12, will present the sixth presentation in a hugely successful musical-comedy series – The Church Basement Ladies in: Rise Up, O Men!, a follow-up to the Minnesota-set smash that, according to TwinCities.com, boasts “plenty of physical comedy” and “a lot of charm and humor.”

A storybook classic comes to magical stage life at Davenport's Adler Theatre when the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities present their March 24 world premiere Alice in Wonderland, a full-length family ballet bursting with unforgettable characters, vibrant colors, astounding dancing, and live music by Orchestra Iowa composed by the legendary Pyotor Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Will it be Miss Scarlet in the kitchen with the dagger? Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the revolver? Professor Plum in the conservatory with the lead pipe? The only way to find out “Whodunit?” is to catch the Black Box Theatre's March 22 through 31 production of Clue: The Musical – a stage adaptation that Broadway World called “an entertaining, humorous, and interactive musical that is not to be missed.”

A Steven Spielberg movie smash becomes a lavish, tuneful, funny, and romantic Quad City Music Guild presentation in Catch Me If You Can, the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit that runs March 22 through 25, and a show that Variety magazine praised for its “swinging orchestrations” and “considerable entertainment value.”

Saturday night’s performance of Venus in Fur at the QC Theatre Workshop was … steamy. Not only in terms of the material, but in the talent on-stage, as real-life married couple Thomas Alan Taylor and Jessica Taylor set the stage ablaze in a two-person show about a young actress who all but forces her way into an audition and proves, over the course of 100 minutes, to be far more then she claims to be.

When Neil Simon’s name is on a production, you tend to expect sentimentality and humor, and the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's opening-night performance of Simon's little-known Proposals was certainly humorous.

After years of presenting theatrical productions only in the summer months, Eldridge's Countryside Community Theatre opens its 2018 season with a show for spring, with Tony-nominated composer Stephen Schwartz's biblical-musical smash Godspell enjoying a March 16 through 25 run at Princeton's Boll's Community Center.

Although best known for his fast-paced verbal slapsticks, Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Neil Simon has also exposed a more serious side in such works as Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound, and Lost in Yonkers, and Simon's knack for both comedy and drama will be on display in Playcrafters' March 9 through 18 staging of Proposals, a work the Houston Press called “gentle and warm, like a late August breeze ruffling the leaves.”

A dark comedy of desire, gamesmanship, and shifting power dynamics hits the QC Theatre Workshop when the Davenport venue presents the area debut of the Brodway hit Venus in Fur, a 2011 Tony Award winner that the New York Times called “a seriously smart and very funny stage seminar on the destabilizing nature of sexual desire,” and that Time Out New York lauded as “deliciously twisty and witty fun.”

With the New York Times calling it “the kind of unheralded gem that sends people into the streets babbling and bright-eyed with the desire to spread the word,” author Annie Baker's thoughtful comedy Circle Mirror Transformation will be staged at Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center March 9 through 11 – the annual presentation for which students from the theatre department’s Play production class were responsible for auditioning, casting, directing, scenic design, lighting and sound design, costume design, and stage management.

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