Arriving just in time for Halloween, monsters – albeit family-friendly ones – will be haunting the halls of Bettendorf's Family Museum on October 20 in the venue's special event Scarecrow Shenanigans: Monster Takeover, a holiday-themed day boasting activities, crafts, experiments, presentations, displays, performances, and plenty of ghoulish guests.
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.
One of the most lauded and beloved comedians of all time makes his long-awaited return to the Adler Theatre on October 22 when the Davenport venue hosts an evening with Jerry Seinfeld, the legendary, Emmy-winning creator/writer/star of Seinfeld and the current Netflix smash Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Patrons of Davenport's Putnam Museum & Science Center are invited to view fantastically ridiculous machines, and dream up some of their own, in the venue's Rube Goldberg: The World of Hilarious Invention!, the new traveling exhibition that opens on September 28 and showcases the legendary Rube Goldberg’s iconic contraptions, imaginative illustrations, and humorous storytelling.
One of the most iconic images of the 20th Century – the fall of the Berlin Wall – will be contextualized in a fascinating October 12 presentation at Davenport's German American Heritage Center, with historian Russell Baldner's presentation Berlin: Before & After the Wall Fell exploring the causes and ramifications of those unforgettable actions of November 9, 1989.
One of the provisions of the sweeping state pension-reform law passed in 2010 has always stuck in the craw of first-responders.
Police and (especially) firefighter unions fought the local government lobby for decades to increase survivor benefits, and then they watched many of those hard-fought wins get wiped away when the General Assembly decided it had to lower pension benefits for new hires to avoid a fiscal catastrophe.
The Illinois Senate recently released a heavily-redacted copy of the federal search-warrant served during the raid of State Senator Martin Sandoval's Statehouse office last month. And the Village of McCook also released a heavily-redacted search-warrant from the federal raid of its town hall.
At about the same time last week, Chicago-based investigators with the FBI and the IRS swooped into Democratic State Senator Marty Sandoval's district office, Statehouse office, and home residence, removing boxes of documents and seizing computers.
Whatever else you may believe, you have to commend Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for trying to live up to her campaign promise of making sure that new economic development isn't concentrated in her city's downtown business district.
The governor's top budget people sent a memo last week to agency directors giving them a heads-up about what will be required in their annual budget-request submissions. They are not easy-peasy asks.
It has to be said, with a show titled The Man With Bogart’s Face, that I expected it to be primarily about someone who looked a bit like legendary film and theatre actor Humphrey Bogart. And yet, the reference to the lead character’s plastic surgery to resemble Bogart was just a throwaway moment at the beginning of the Black Box Theatre’s latest production.
A Tony Award-winning slapstick lauded by the New York Times' renowned theatre critic Frank Rich as “the funniest play written in my lifetime,” author Michael Frayn's Noises Off opens the 2019-2020 mainstage season at Augustana College, a rib-tickler that the New York Post called “the funniest farce ever written” and that Variety magazine praised for its “comedic brilliance” as “the kind of door-slamming, trouser-dropping, pratfall-prone, and utterly manic chaos that is pure farce.”
The winner of a staggering 10 Tony Awards that the New York Daily News deemed “vivid and smart” as it “brilliantly weaves plot, music, and dance together,” the stage sensation Billy Elliot: The Musical hoofs its way into Moline's Spotlight Theatre October 18 through 27, this joyous celebration of community and individuality leading Bloomberg News to rave that the show “really does have something for everyone – and that something is, gloriously, art.”
If Halloween is approaching, it must be time for that annual theatrical command: “Let's do the 'Time Warp' again!” Consequently, the Circa '21 Speakeasy will stage its fourth-annual presentation of the cult-musical smash The Rocky Horror Show from October 18 through 27, treating audiences to live performances of classic songs and, of course, prop bags to complete the nutty, interactive experience.
The Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Singin' in the Rain will have you laughin' at clouds, no matter how dark the weather. The 1983 musical is based on the beloved 1952 film, with its screenplay (and the musical's book) by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed writing music and lyrics for most of its tunes, many of which are borrowed from 1920s and 1930s films (by MGM, natch, which concocted this film). Thus, the show is in many ways a jukebox musical, and Circa '21's production uses the 2012 revival's script, which is a pared-down and shuffled version of the original.
Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter Greta Ruth brings her strain of lush, progressive folk to the Rozz-Tox stage on October 17.
Chicago’s veteran DJ-producer Angel Alanis (a.k.a. A2) and techno selector-producer Maria Goetz visit Rozz-Tox on October 18, backed up by Chicago DJ Franktronic and the Quad Cities’ own Mike Derer and Higgy. The stacked Northern Parallels 037 bill highlights techno and house music, with a hint of acid and electro, in all of their varied forms.
With Blues Blast magazine calling his playing “speed-freak fast and clean and crisp” and Northwest Music Scene deeming him “a force to be reckoned with,” venerated rock guitarist, keyboardist, and singer Pat Travers brings his ensemble the Pat Travers Band to Davenport's Redstone Room on October 19, the high-energy trio playing from a repertoire of hits dating all the way back to Travers' self-titled 1976 debut.
Touring in support of their 2019 album By Blood – a work that NPR deemed “an impressive feat of song craft from one of roots music's most exciting, unpredictable acts – the married singer/songwriters Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearts bring their musical project Shovels & Rope to Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on October 19, sharing the indie-folk talents that led Rolling Stone to praise the duo's “inimitable vocal harmonies” and combined ability “to find joy in unexpected places.”
A giant, marathon-style bill of noise, ambient, and experimental music – primarily sourced from the Quad Cities, but extending its reach across the Midwest and beyond – lands at Rozz-Tox on October 19 under the title Weird Town 6.
If you're a fan of globe-trotting action thrillers, and a fan of Will Smith, what could be more fun than Gemini Man, director Ang Lee's stunt-heavy entertainment that gives you two Smiths for the price of one? Just about anything, it turns out, because Lee's latest is a crushing bore: heavy-spirited when it needs to be light – which is pretty much all the time – and so serious about its objectively ridiculous plot that we're given little choice but to laugh at it. Speaking on behalf of my fellow Gemini males, we deserve better representation than this.
So. Now that the movie has finally opened after what has felt like years of pre-release hype and inevitable backlash to that hype, a couple of questions about writer/director Todd Phillips' super-villain origin story Joker can at last be answered, at least from a personal perspective.
When I first heard of Dreamworks Animation's Abominable, the tale of a friendly Yeti and his quest to return home to the Himalayas, my first thought was “Didn't I just see this?!” But then I remembered that the film I was thinking of – this past April's animated comedy Missing Link – was actually about a friendly Sasquatch and his quest to return home to the Himalayas. Totally different.
Obsessives who passionately devoured every minute with the upstairs Crawleys and the downstairs help might very well be annoyed by how little everyone is given to do, and how little any of it matters. Those who never watched a second of the show might be utterly lost and left wondering what the big deal is. For my part, though, I found this feature-film exercise in unmitigated fan service a touching, entertaining reunion with half-forgotten friends, even though it doesn't resemble a movie so much as a highbrow Comic-Con panel in which those on the dais receive thunderous ovations merely for showing up.
Judging by reports from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, which wrapped on September 15, the true shocker of this year's fest wasn't that intimate chamber drama The Two Popes turned out to be a ton of fun (though apparently it was) or that the already-notorious Joker didn't receive nearly the acclaim that greeted its eight-minute-standing-ovation debut in Venice (though apparently it didn't) or that the Audience Award – which, last year, was awarded to eventual Best Picture Oscar winner Green Book – went to the wildly divisive Hitler comedy Jojo Rabbit. (Wha-a-a-a-a?!?) It was that the heftiest Oscar buzz went to Jennifer Lopez, of all people, for playing, of all things, a larcenous stripper in writer/director Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers.
Drawings and photographs by a pair of gifted Midwestern artists will fill the Quad City Arts Center Gallery from October 18 through December 6, with the Rock Island venue housing the exhibits Sky Weave, featuring new works by Des Moines' Emily Newman, and The Set Table: Forks on the Left, Metaphors on the Right, boasting the talents of Muscatine-based photographer Randy Richmond.
A favorite exhibit among Quad Citians makes its eagerly anticipated return to Davenport's Figge Art Museum October 19 through February 2, with artist Rose Frantzen's multi-dimensional installation Portrait of Maquoketa boasting 180 portraits of Maquoketans and a 315-square-foot landscape view of the city, and newly accompanied by illustrations from Chuck Morris' 2019 children's book The Storytelling Tree.
Collages, paintings, and inventively crafted birdhouses will all be on display in the Quad City Arts International Airport Gallery from September 4 through October 28, with the venue boasting featured works by Amber Williams and Carla Markwart, as well as colorful and functional birdhouses created by 20 artistic talents based in the Quad Cities.
Stunning examples of mixed-media artwork will be on display at Black Hawk College's ArtSpace Gallery from September 30 through November 1 as the venue houses Sarah Rehmer's A Tenuous Space, the latest exhibition by the lauded Illinois artist whose works have been showcased in such esteemed art magazines as Studio Visit, Encaustic Arts, and Shadow & Light.
From October 4 through November 6 at Bettendorf's Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy, area artists will showcase miniature works of maximum beauty in Les Petites: Big Creativity, Small Package, the new group exhibition boasting a variety of creations in a variety of mediums, all of them designed within the confines of 12 inches by 12 inches.
You'll get a rundown of What's Happenin' along with your keys to the Quad Cities' culture.
