Mixing true stories with doses of famed wit and wisdom by one of history's most revered authors, acclaimed storyteller Brian "Fox" Ellis steps into the LeClaire Community Library on November 13 to regale his audience with the live performance piece Steamboatin' Down the Mississippi with Mark Twain, a delightful program of jokes, tall tales, and history woven together with songs and stories.

With the Boston Globe deeming the film "as pure and plaintive as a mountain ballad" and the Los Angeles Times raving "it makes history sing," writer/director John Sayles' Oscar-nominated 1987 drama Matewan enjoys a special November 13 screening at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox, this celebrated work's local presentation co-hosted by Iowa General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World.

In a fascinating program held at Davenport's Figge Art Museum on November 14, Celebrating the Lewis Collection: Marsden Hartley & Fellow American Modernists will find Gail R. Scott, director of the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project with Bates College Museum of Art, discussing the pioneering American modernist and the six works by Hartley recently gifted to the Figge by Linda and J. Randolph Lewis.

A trio of Iowa-based artists working in a trio of artistic mediums will have pieces showcased at the Quad City Arts International Airport through January 5, with the gallery, in Brown Swanson, Hassig, & Shahrivar, hosting arresting examples of fused glass by Des Moines' Tilda Brown Swanson, collages by Cedar Rapids' Michael Hassig, and oil landscape paintings by Iowa Falls' Naser D. Shahrivar.

Delivering what the Denver Post called “a sleighful of gifts” including “a minuet of the familiar and the special” and a “gentle, genial advocacy of the impossible,” the holiday spectacular Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical enjoys a November 6 through December 29 return to Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, this delightful adaptation of the beloved movie classic boasting music and lyrics by The Music Man creator Meredith Willson.

Delivering what the New York Times deemed "the subliminal potency of music, the head-scratching surprise of a modernist poem, and the cockeyed allure of a surrealist painting," Tony-nominated playwright Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice enjoys a November 7 through 10 staging by the University of Dubuque’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts, the Times adding that the genre-spanning show is a "devastatingly lovely – and just plain devastating – theatrical gloss on the Orpheus myth."

One of the area's most eagerly anticipated sales events returns to Rock Island's QCCA Expo Center November 1 through 3, as Melting Pot Productions, Inc. presents this year's autumnal 2024 Antique Spectacular Vintage Market Quad Cities, allowing hunters of vintage goods an all-weekend opportunity to shop for a wide range of quality antiques.

Appearing in a pair of relaxed, 45-minute public events as a guest in Quad City Arts' Visiting Artists Series, renowned pianist, composer, actress, and author Robin Spielberg hosts respective presentations in Rock Island and Muscatine on November 5 and 7, this lauded Steinway artist and founding member of the Atlantic Theatre Company also a national celebrity artist spokesperson for the American Music Therapy Association.

Beloved guest performers on two of the most successful sitcoms in television will be demonstrating their gifts for standup at Galesburg's Orpheum Theatre on November 2, with the touring sensation Where Are they Wow! showcasing the singular comedy stylings of Steve Hytner, who played Kenny Bania on NBC's Seinfeld, and Marc Price, beloved from NBC's Family Ties as Alex Keaton's pal and Mallory's not-so-secret admirer Skippy.

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a work that "makes an exquisite case for the impossibility of caging the heart," the award-winning Austrian drama Great Freedom enjoys a November 7 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, director/co-writer Sebastian Meise's moving film also praised by The Hollywood Reporter as "a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental."

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