More than two dozen local, regional, and national comedians will be bringing the funny to this year's Alternating Currents festival, with August 24 and 25 standup sets – plus one hilariously awful movie – scheduled to make patrons roar with laughter at four venues in downtown Davenport.
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.
Presented at Moline's Black Box Theatre in the style of a radio play complete with live music, sound effects, and actors with scripts in hand, three new episodes of the locally produced podcast All You Care to Eat will be performed by the area troupe Comedy Thingy on August 25 and taped in front of a live “studio” audience.
Wildlife, history, geology, and more will be explored when River Action hosts presentations in this year's Channel Cat Talks and Riverine Walks – “Explore the River Series” celebrations of the Quad Cities' unique culture and landscape taking place four times weekly from May 29 through September 1.
One of the most popular and successful children's-book authors of all time – along with many of his beloved animal, bird, and insect friends – will be celebrated in a new Family Museum exhibition opening May 26, as the Bettendorf venue hosts the touring family delight Very Eric Carle: A Very Hungry, Quiet, Lonely, Clumsy, Busy Exhibit.
The Democratic Party of Illinois has sent out what could wind up being the most unintentionally hilarious campaign mailer of the season.
Lake County politics has been rocked to the core this month by the abrupt resignation of state Representative Nick Sauer (R-Lake Barrington) and the announcement by Lake County Board Chairman Aaron Lawlor that he is dropping out of his reelection campaign after earlier disclosing that he was suffering from drug addiction.
It’s really a mess up there.
The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) prohibits businesses from making auto-dialed or pre-recorded calls to a person's cell phone and similar telemarketing calls to home phones. However, this law does not apply to the federal government, nor to contractors working on the government's behalf. The only prohibition for the feds is political campaign telemarketing (RCReader.com/y/ntk1).
Last month, Representative Christian Mitchell (D-Chicago) was interviewed by Chicago Public Radio about his new role as interim executive director of the Democratic Party of Illinois.
President Donald Trump visited an Illinois county last week which was once considered a Democratic-party bastion, but has been slipping away to the Republicans throughout this decade.
Described by the New York Times as “a hallucinatory poetic fantasy that blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving,” Tony Award nominee Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone will enjoy its area debut at Davenport's QC Theatre Workshop August 24 through September 9, Ruhl's funny and thoughtful comedy inspiring SFGate.com to laud the author's “gifts of probing humor, vivid imagination, and poignant humanity.”
With the New York Times lauding Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Neil Simon for “writing at his ebullient best” and “making us laugh so effortlessly,” the playwright's California Suite will enjoy an August 16 through 26 staging in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's 50th-anniversary season of returning audience favorites, marking the popular comedy's first performance at any area venue since 2007.
I grew up listening to ABBA's Gold: Greatest Hits (thanks, Mom!), so I felt right at home at Friday’s opening-night performance of Mamma Mia! at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse. But loving the iconic ABBA is not a prerequisite to enjoying director/choreographer Michael Matthew Ferrell’s fun-filled production.
We all know that dying is a part of life, but most of us don’t like to think about it. Being a cancer survivor myself, I know all too well what it's like to face death, and whether you're young or old, death does not discriminate. So when I went to see Saturday night's Tuesdays with Morrie – playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of Mitch Albom's bestselling memoir – at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, I knew, based on its subject matter, that I was in for an emotional roller-coaster ride that would once again make me face the reality of my mortality.
Every once in a while, you see a show in which all the pieces click and it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In the case of Next to Normal, currently running at the Black Box Theatre, the intimacy of the venue was reflected in the intimacy of the material, and as such, director Kyle Schneider’s dark musical was extremely moving.
Headlined by an Adler Theatre engagement with the indie rockers of Dr. Dog, this year's Alternating Currents festival – boasting more than 100 events and performances at 16 Quad Cities venues – will feature concert sets with more than three dozen bands and solo performers from August 23 through 26, their music encompassing every genre from rock to folk to jazz to country.
One of the most iconic and lauded bands in American history makes an eagerly awaited appearance at the TaxSlayer Center on August 26, with the Moline venue presenting an evening with the Beach Boys, the beloved surf-rock and pop musicians performing locally on their nationwide 50th Anniversary Tour in support of their latest album That’s Why God Made the Radio.
Held in honor of the late Quad Cities native commonly known as “The Jazz Professor,” Polyrhythms hosts a collection of inspired jazz talents in this year's Bill Bell Jazz & Heritage Festival, an August 17 through 19 weekend celebration at Rock Island's Martin Luther King Jr. Park and Davenport's Redstone Room boasting cultural presentations, family activities, and concert sets with musical luminaries including Chicago great Frank Russell.
It'll be “Surf's up!” at Davenport's LeClaire Park when the Quad City Symphony Orchestra performs its annual Quad City Bank & Trust Riverfront Pops concert on August 18, this year's outdoor event “Pet Sounds Live – a Beach Boys Celebratrion” featuring the area musicians performing the iconic album in its entirety under guest conductor Jeffrey Reed.
Performing a special August 17 concert presented by the Mississippi Valley Blues Society, the Nashville-based blues-rock trio Too Slim & the Taildraggers plays Bettendorf's Harley Corin's in support of the musicians' latest album High Desert Heat, a release RockAndBluesMuse.com called “a testament to the power and gravity that only comes with time,” and Blues Blast magazine lauded with “The sound is big, the sound is rocking, and the band gives a no-holds-barred performance.”
Inspired by true events – or, as an opening title card explains, “based upon some fo' real, fo' real sh*t – BlacKkKlansman is a police procedural, a thriller, a comedy, a celebration of black identity, an indictment of white nationalism, and a rallying cry against more than a century's worth of media and public complacency, misrepresentation, and offense. Being a Spike Lee joint, the movie's stunning success on these and additional levels isn't necessary a surprise.
Short works, feature-length films, comedy classics, documentaries, an awards party, and a Q & A with Bettendorf natives Scott Beck and Bryan Woods – co-screenwriters of the horror smash A Quiet Place – are just some what movie fans can look forward to at this year's Alternating Current festival, with more than a dozen events scheduled for venues in downtown Davenport and at Rock Island's Wake Brewery.
A question for those of you who saw Disney's Christopher Robin over the weekend: While watching Ewan McGregor's titular character interact with vocal actor Jim Cumming's eerily lifelike Winnie-the-Pooh, did any of you immediately flash to Mark Wahlberg trading profane quips with his Teddy-bear best friend in Ted? Another question: If so, did you find yourself, as I did, kind of wishing you were watching Ted instead?
Lord knows we don't need any more awards for movies and the people who make them. But after watching the latest sequel to Mission: Impossible – hell, after watching its first 10 minutes – I was actively wishing that someone would at least fashion an oversize blue ribbon, or maybe an Edible Arrangements bouquet of some sort, in recognition of “Best Pre-Opening-Credits Sequence.” Because the one that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and company have devised for Mission: Impossible – Fallout is practically a movie of its own, and an awfully good one.
Any movie that casts 72-year-old Cher as the mother of 69-year-old Meryl Streep clearly has almost zero interest in realism and an almost immeasurable passion for kitsch. And so it is with Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the sequel to 2008's screen explosion of ABBA tunes that proves slightly less obnoxious than its predecessor, which turns out to be both a major plus and a significant minus.
Encaustic pieces and mixed-media works by artists from both sides of the Mississippi River will be on display August 24 through October 12, as Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center presents Breathe, a collection of works by Carol Hamilton of Harvard, Illinois, and The Grayed Air, a creative assemblage by the Davenport-based Matt Pulford.
For the first exhibition in the college's 2018-19 academic year, the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art will showcase works by artists who honed their skills at Augustana itself, with Five Alumni: Continuing to Create, from August 24 through October 27, presenting beautiful, fascinating, and resonant works by a quintet of the school's most gifted graduates.
One of the Quad Cities' most revered artists, and the husband (of 63 years) of area icon Isabel Bloom, will be celebrated in the Figge Art Museum's John Bloom: Close to Home, an August 25 through January 13 exhibition of works by the regional artist who, at age 96, passed away in 2002.
On August 25, a quartet of art in a wide variety of mediums will brighten the streets and venues of the 2018 Alternating Currents festival, with the scheduled events in downtown Davenport including an arts & crafts marketplace, a chalk-art festival, art workshops, and an exhibition by area artist Glenn Boyles.
Paintings, sculptures, and works by a prominent Quad Cities gallery owner will all be on display at the Quad City International Airport July 3 through August 29, as Quad City Arts presents a trio of new exhibitions by Des Moines painter Robert Reeves, sculptor Matt Moyer from Columbia, Missouri, and Bettendorf's Pat Beréskin, owner and operator of the city's Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy.
