Lauded by the New York Times as “effortlessly endearing” and by Variety magazine as “enormously satisfying,” The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee continues the 60th summer season at Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, the show's July 1 through 11 run sure to demonstrate why composer William Finn's celebrated 2005 musical comedy received two Tony Awards and enjoyed a Broadway run of 1,136 performances.

Human figures, evocative colors, and a new yet familiar Quad Cities landmark are among the visuals showcased in the latest exhibitions at Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center, with the venue, through August 13, highlighting new paintings by Port Byron's Laura Vincent-Arnold in Internal Landscapes and Bettendorf's John Born in Bridging the Divide.

Lauded by the Boston Globe as “brilliant metaphorical filmmaking,” director István Szabó's 1981 drama Mephisto serves as the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of German-themed works screened on the first Friday of every month, with Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center, on July 2, co-hosting their presentation of the first Hungarian movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.

One of the most familiar voices in area-sports radio can be heard again, in a different context, when the Davenport Public Library hosts the virtual presentation Inside Iowa Sports, an online June 26 event boasting decades worth of anecdotes delivered by Gary “Dolph” Dolphin, the longtime play-by-play broadcaster for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes football and men's-basketball teams.