Although the pandemic is currently depriving us of movie sequels, the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities are at least ensuring that local audiences get a live one with the company's Ballet on the Lawn: Take Two – a September 20 follow-up to the dancers' hugely successful outdoor presentations of Ballet on the Lawn that took place, as this new one will, at Davenport's Outing Club.
This feature collects articles published online by Quad Cities-area media outlets and by CapitolFax.com and the state-politics sections of the Des Moines Register and the State Journal-Register.
Internationally beloved for his memorable appearances in the seven Police Academy comedies, and a veteran of such other cult classics as Spaceballs and Cheech & Chong's Next Movie, standup comedian, actor, and beatboxer Michael Winslow takes the stage at the Rhythm City Casino Resort Rhythm Room for two performances on September 24, initiating the Davenport venue's 2020-21 comedy series and demonstrating why he's commonly referred to as “The Man of 10,000 Sound Effects.”
Occurring in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote, a virtual presentation on the Putnam Museum & Science Center exhibit Liberated Voices/Changed Lives will take place on September 17 – a timely and fascinating program hosted by the Bettendorf Public Library as part of its popular Community Connections series.
Outdoor adventurers are again invited to paddle, mountain bike, and run their way to the top in the eagerly anticipated, 15th-annual Taming of the Slough Mississippi River Adventure Triathlon, the River Action-sponsored test of endurance set to take place on Saturday, September 12.
There's been much gnashing of teeth since the state announced that just 21 social-equity applicants had qualified for regional lotteries that will award 75 cannabis-dispensary store licenses. The 21 winning entities submitted well over 300 applications for those 75 licenses, which has forced a tie-breaking round.
It was a only a matter of time before the scientific evidence relative to the SARS-CoV2 virus and COVID-19 downgrading its lethality overwhelmed the narratives that continue to perpetuate shuttering businesses and schools.
When Governor JB Pritzker announced the state COVID-19 "mitigation" plan for the Metro East on August 16, he said it was done in conjunction "with local officials in the Metro East region and across the border in St Louis." Last week, though, the governor admitted the cross-border arrangement to try to contain the virus's spread was a "mistake." Man, was it ever.
Julian Assange's hearing in the British court to be extradited to the United States is scheduled to resume September 7, 2020. Assange’s partner Stella Moris visited him this month with their children at Belmarsh prison for the first time since March of this year, and reports that his physical condition has deteriorated noticeably since that time.
The late Jim Thompson was just 40 years old when he was first elected governor of Illinois in 1976. Rod Blagojevich was called a youthful politician, but he was 45 on the day he was elected governor. Jim Edgar was 44 in November of 1990. After serving 14 years as governor, longer than anyone else in Illinois history, Thompson was still just 54 years old the day he left office.
It’s been a painfully long wait, but I finally got to crack open my new notebook and fresh pen for Wednesday night's performance of The Savannah Sipping Society at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse.
Two powerhouse vocal legends will be celebrated by one supremely gifted Augustana College professor at the Circa '21 Speakeasy on September 12, with area stage performer, director, and instructor Shelley Cooper showcasing the musical talents of her musical idols Mary Martin and Ethel Merman in the exuberant one-woman show Mary & Ethel: How I Learned to Sing.
With its author praised by the New York Times for “his knack for telling stories that, at the very moment when they seem to be settling into predictable paths, throw in a zinger,” Jeffrey Hatcher's darkly hilarious Three Viewings enjoys a September 24 through October 3 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, the playwright lauded by the Los Angeles Times for “his gifts [that] are distinctive, unmistakable, and quite a bit of fun to boot.”
Reviews by Jeff Ashcraft, Patricia Baugh-Riechers, Audra Beals, Pamela Briggs, Dee Canfield, Kim Eastland, Emily Heninger, Heather Herkelman, Paula Jolly, Victoria Navarro, Mark Ruebling, Mike Schulz, Joy Thompson, Oz Torres, Brent Tubbs, Jill (Pearson) Walsh, and Thom White.
Hosted by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's music director and conductor Mark Russell Smith, the organization's annual Signature Soirée will take place online this year on September 19, the virtual Moonlight Sonata event boasting performances by the symphony's resident concertmaster Naha Greenholtz and principal cellist Hannah Holman, a live auction, and a three-course dinner, chocolates, and a floral arrangement delivered to ticket-holders' homes.
One of the Quad Cities' most popular jam bands gets to close out the River Music Experience's 2020 “Live @ Five” series in style, with the rockers of The Dawn performing a free courtyard concert in the Davenport venue on September 25.
Rock Island’s resident drone/ambient scientist Terry Skaggs seems to drop a new release under his dead lizard grin moniker at the crazy clip of one per month, further populating his bottomless Bandcamp page which now sits at 77 releases (!!!) with exercises in drifting electronic sculpture, neo-classical orchestral textures, and the occasional hushed electronic beat pattern.
On August 27, we celebrated what would have been Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s 83rd birthday. Though she passed away in 2007, the spirit of her music reaches more people now than ever before thanks to a series of high-profile reissue campaigns and dissemination across the Internet.
Radio host, podcaster, and DIY history buff Kristian Day has become a patron saint and detailed archivist of the criss-crossing underground music circuits of Iowa. His podcast Iowa Basement Tapes has logged over 100 shows to date, all of which focus on bands that have essentially been forgotten by time, mostly after years of inaction.
I should preface by saying that I'm terrible at predicting Emmy Award winners. Seriously: I'm terrible.
Making history this past winter as the first movie to ever receive Academy Award nominations for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature, directors Tama Kotevska's and Ljubomir Stefanov's critically acclaimed Honeyland, from North Macedonia, enjoys a September 20 screening at the Blue Grass Drive-in as a fall presentation in River Action's 2020 QC Environmental Film Series.
As contemporary romantic comedies go, The Broken Hearts Gallery is like something you'd create from a kit. The instructions are easy to follow, every expected piece is dutifully included, and there's no veering from the manual – what you wind up getting looks remarkably similar to what's pictured on the box. (Or, in this case, the poster.) But a pandemic-era lack of cineplex options can make you inordinately grateful for simple, much-appreciated qualities such as charm and wit and personality, all of which writer/director Natalie Krinsky's debut feature has in abundance.
Given its epically convoluted particulars, cagey metaphysics, and dialogue that's frequently (and most likely intentionally) indecipherable, Christopher Nolan's long-awaited action thriller Tenet boasts a narrative that I couldn't spoil even if I wanted to. And I kind of really want to, if only to explain why, after two-and-a-half hours, my brain was practically bleeding from the strain of trying to figure this thing out.
Now playing at area theaters and drive-ins.
Held in conjunction with the forthcoming Figge Art Museum exhibition A Visualization of Hope (on display September 26 through December 13), a special Virtual Artist Celebration hosted by Pamela Crouch will take place on September 24, with the Living Proof Exhibit Executive Director introducing the eagerly awaited exhibit that celebrates the creative spirit of those impacted by cancer.
Presented by the area nonprofit Living Proof Exhibit, an organization that celebrates the creative spirit of those impacted by cancer, the eagerly awaited annual exhibition A Visualization of Hope will bring messages of strength and resilience to Davenport's Figge Art Museum September 26 through December 13 (with the exhibit's virtual programming beginning September 24), with Living Proof Exhibit's collection boasting beautiful and evocative works by cancer survivors living within a 200-mile radius of the Quad Cities.
Rarely considered pieces of furniture will be made fascinating in a new Figge Art Museum exhibit, with the Davenport venue, from September 12 through January 17, showcasing fully functional artworks in Seating by Design – an exhibition the museum's executive director Michelle Hargrave says should “inspire ideas and new ways to consider the things that we are sitting on so much. Particularly nowadays while we're spending so much time in our homes.”
Author Wallace Stegner wrote, “One cannot be pessimistic about the West … this is the native home of hope.” And images of hope – as well as images of struggle, endurance, triumph, and astonishing landscapes – will be on display at the Figge Art Museum from June 27 through September 20, with the Davenport venue hosting glorious, thought-provoking photographs in the new exhibition Magnetic West: The Enduring Allure of the American West.
Multi-hued works by a Black Hawk College alumna will be featured in the school's ArtSpace Gallery from August 10 through October 2, as the Moline college hosts a showcase for interdisciplinary artist Nicole Davis in her her exhibition Let the Circle Be Unbroken.
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