An inventive and riotous improv-comedy troupe composed of Jeff De Leon, Jen Kuhle, and Leslie Mitchell, Wisenheimer will celebrate a significant milestone at Moline's Black Box Theatre on December 4 with their 10-year anniversary show, an evening that will boast a brief retrospective, an opening-act improv performance, announcements on future plans, and maybe a surprise or two.
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A film and television actor, touring comedian, and Emmy-winning host for the popular Discovery Channel game show Cash Cab, standup sensation Ben Bailey plays a December 5 engagement at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Rhythm Room, the New Jersey-based talent also familiar from appearances on such TV series as 30 Rock, Blue Bloods, Parenthood, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
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In a December 6 program hosted by the Scott County Iowa Genealogical Society and Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center of the Davenport Public Library, patrons at the library's Main Street branch are invited to learn more about their family histories in the in-person and virtual event Your Guide to the 1950 Census, a special presentation hosted by author and traveling public speaker Lisa Louise Cooke.
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Offering participants a special virtual program in its popular “Community Connections” series, the Bettendorf Public Library invites yuletide revelers to have a jolly old time learning about a jolly old elf in The History & Folklore of Santa Claus, in which Laura Keyes of Historic Voices explores the origins and evolution a figure beloved to children (and more than a few adults) all around the world.
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For the first time since 2019, one of the Quad Cities' most adored holiday traditions returns to Davenport's Adler Theatre when the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities perform Tchaikovsky's holiday dance classic The Nutcracker. A December 11 and 12 event boasting new choreography and staging by Artistic Director Courtney Lyon and Artistic Associate Emily Kate Long, the eagerly awaited family experience will feature live musical accompaniment by Orchestra Iowa, as well as the return of guest artist Domingo Rubio, the longtime portrayer of the company's dancing Dracula.
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Some Illinois House Democrats got a bit of a shock during a private caucus meeting held not long after the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) filed its proposed redistricting plan with a federal three-judge panel the other day.
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Governor JB Pritzker told reporters not long ago that he was worried about the plateauing COVID-19 hospitalization rate and said he wouldn’t yet lift his statewide mask-mandate. But the governor told me something around the same time during an interview that he hasn’t yet said publicly: He’s most concerned about what may happen in January and February and upbeat about the spring and summer.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom soundly beat back a recall effort in September partly by trumpeting his proud record battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Virginia’s Democratic governor also ran on his robust anti-COVID program and lost last week to a Republican who opposed mask- and vaccine-mandates. That same Republican ran as unabashedly pro-life and blasted the incumbent pro-choice Democrat for being against “parents’ rights.”
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Numerous inconsistencies, controversies, and mass confusion relative to all things COVID-19 have prevailed thanks to mainstream broadcast, print, and social media's fear-soaked 24/7 narratives, bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies and public-health authorities including the NIH, CDC, HHS, and FDA. Still, many of us continued to believe that an abundance of caution would be the norm rather than the exception when it came to experimentally injecting our children against a disease they are provably at zero risk from getting or giving to others.
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It's well-documented that two years before his public execution, President Kennedy exposed that secret societies influence and control news organizations in order to conceal their corrupt actions and expand their authoritarian rule. In his April 1961 speech before the American Newspaper Publisher Association's meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel John F. Kennedy stated, “Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed– and no republic can survive.”
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One of the most venerable and beloved stage musicals of all time, The Sound of Music completes the 2021 season at Moline's Spotlight Theatre, the show adored by all generations for its rich characters, beautiful celebration of family, and an unforgettable Rodgers & Hammerstein score boasting such iconic songs as “My Favorite Things,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” “Climb Ev'ry Mountain,” “Edleweiss,” and the unforgettable title tune.
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A 178-year-old holiday perennial will be presented in a brand-new old-timey way from December 2 through 12 when Moline's Black Box Theatre presents its debut of A Christmas Carol on the Radio (well, really on stage), a sincere yet cheeky interpretation of Charles Dickens' beloved yuletide classic staged in the style of a 1940s audio-drama.
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Described by the Orlando Weekly as a slapstick that “accomplishes the small miracle of making all Christmas myths seem both utterly ridiculous and absolutely essential,” the holiday-themed spoof Every Christmas Story Ever Told (and then some) closes the 2021 season for Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, a show lauded by the Sacramento Bee as “a respectful homage and side-splitting parody at the same time.”
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Friday night’s production at the Mockingbird on Main started with a moment of silence for Broadway’s legendary composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who passed away earlier that day. Yet while I’m sure a similar moment was shared across any number of theatres around the globe, what happened afterward was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
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Director Luke Vermiere’s Holiday Inn – which I attended on its final, Tuesday-night dress rehearsal – just may have been the dose of “Cindy Lou Who” that I needed to embrace the Christmas spirit, and perhaps this show's one-weekend run will do the same for you.
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Instrumental and vocal celebrations of overseas beauty will be on the docket as the Quad City Symphony Orchestra continues its Masterworks season with the musicians' third showcase for 2021-22: English Serenade, December 4 and 5 presentations held at the Adler Theatre and Bartlett Performing Arts Center highlighted by the performances of Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman and the QCSO's longtime principal horn player Marc Zyla.
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Lauded by Paste magazine as an artist whose “remarkable repertoire” boasts compositions that are “intriguing and alluring,” acoustic guitarist and singer/songwriter Keller Williams headlines a December 4 concert at Davenport's Redstone Room, a “one-man jam band” whom AllMusic.com also deemed “an utterly unique performer whose musical eccentricities don't keep him from being immediately accessible.”
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Touring in support of their October release Georgia Blue, an album that Pitchfork deemed “a joyful affair with sadness lurking in the shadows,” Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit headline a December 4 concert event at East Moline's The Rust Belt, the alternative-country and Southern rock ensemble's frontman a four-time Grammy Award winner who was also a member of Drive-By Truckers from 2001 to 2007.
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After a virtual version of their annual program was streamed in 2020, a sextet of Augustana College music ensembles reunite in person for December 4 and 5 presentations of Christmas at Augustana, a yuletide celebration at Centennial Hall boasting the collective talents of the Augustana Brass Ensemble, Augustana Symphony Orchestra, Ascension Ringers, Augustana Choir, Jenny Lind Vocal Ensemble, and Augustana Concert Chorale.
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With Pop Matters describing his most recent album as delivering “a unified message of love, kindness, and island vibes,” Grammy-winning singer/songwriter and guitarist Jason Mraz brings his national tour to Davenport's Adler Theatre on December 7, the pop/folk, jazz, and reggae artist hitting the road with longtime collaborator Toca Rivera, who has performed with Mraz since his coffee-shop days.
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Upon leaving my screening of Encanto, I was convinced that I had just seen my favorite animated Disney movie since 2016's Zootopia, the Oscar-winning comedy that, maybe not coincidentally, was also co-directed by the new film's Jared Bush and Byron Howard. But when I tried thinking back to the animated Disney musical that I most loved prior to Encanto, I drew a blank.
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It would be wonderful to report that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is great. Hell, it would be wonderful to report that it's nothing more, or less, than goofy dumb fun. But if you only smile four times (I counted) over the course of two hours, I'm not sure that qualifies as having fun.
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Belfast's overall tone is child's-view fanciful – a rose-tinted (albeit mostly black-and-white) love letter to the formative people and places of Kenneth Branagh's youth – but with added dollops of painful real-world experience that make for an awkward, not entirely successful blend. The movie is oftentimes touching and funny, and I was continually engaged. I just never quite bought what its writer/director was selling.
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Now playing at area theaters.
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Bettendorf's Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy will be decking its halls, and its walls, with seasonal delights in the venue's holiday exhibition Color Your Christmas, a showcase of works by 45 area artists designed to put visitors in a holly-jolly mood.
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Expressive, multi-hued works by an esteemed professor of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa will be on display in St. Ambrose University's Catich Gallery, with the venue, through December 17. showcasing paintings by Susan Chrysler White, whose artistic creations, as the artist says, are “subjects that I am grappling with as my work moves into more poignantly personal terrain.”
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Works in a trio of disparate artistic mediums, by a trio of Illinois talents, will be on display at the Quad City Arts International Airport Gallery through December 31, with the Moline airport showcasing ceramic sculpture by Rock Island's Lori Roderick, collagraph prints by Carbondale's Luca Cruzat, and acrylic paintings by Glenville's Elise Boughner.
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Returning this fall to the Figge Art Museum's first-floor Gildehaus Gallery, the latest offering in the Figgeo Video series will, through January 2, feature the work of acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Janet Biggs, whose video and performance works focus on extreme situations and experiences, drawing connections between physical and psychological terrains and tests of human limits.
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The celebration of a key artist in the development of printmaking in the 20th century, as well as the artistic community that he created, Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking will be on display at Davenport's Figge Art Museum through January 9, the exhibit a fascinating showcase of a talent who challenged the idea of lithography as a high-craft process.
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