Touring in support of their most recent studio album Servitude, which TheRazorsEdge.rocks deemed "a conveyor belt of unbridled badassery," the death-metal artists of The Black Dahlia Murder headline a May 1 concert event at Davenport's Capitol Theatre, Yardbarker's Jeff Mezyido having included the band in 2025's list of "the greatest metal acts that formed in the 2000s."

Touring in support of new songs and his 2023 EP Nighttime Animal that NashvilleSCENE said "moves at a groovy, unhurried pace, giving it a kind of trippy, tropical-island vibe," singer/songwriter ZG Smith headlines a May 4 concert at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, Under the Radar adding that the EP's "warm guitar lines, subdued percussion, and dreamy vocals give it an alluring and effortless sheen."

With Texas Music Times raving that "The brilliance of Adam Hood" lies "in how he can be complex with natural simplicity," the singer/songwriter headlines a May 7 engagement at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, his 2022 album Bad Days Better inspiring Turn Up the Amp to award it "an early vote for Record of the Year in whatever category you want to place it."

With her music described by A Jazz Noise as "a raw, abrasive, oppressive, and thrilling journey,” Chicago-based improviser, composer, educator, curator, and woodwind specialist Emily Rach Beisel performs at Rock Island venue Rozz-Tox on May 7, the evening also boasting a set with the Denver-based musicians of A Light Among Many, self-described as delivering "suffocating, sprawling soundscapes of drone and doom metal."

A Pulitzer Prize winner hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the finest American plays of the 20th century," Thornton Wilder's classic The Skin of Our Teeth enjoys a May 7 through 10 staging in Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center, the 1942 play also lauded by the Herald-Tribune as "wonderfully wise" and "a tremendously exciting and profound stage fable.

From May 5 through 9, a TV pop-culture phenomenon comes to thrilling stage life when Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse presents Schoolhouse Rock Live!, the beloved show – presented as part of the venue's Magic Owl Children's Theatre program – inspired by the Emmy Award-winning 1970s Saturday-morning cartoon series that taught history, grammar, math, and more through clever, tuneful songs.

A two-time Academy Award winner The Times deemed a "landmark movie, hugely important, that's unafraid of difficult ideas," writer/director Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest will be screened at the Figge Art Museum on May 7, this powerful 2023 work the latest presentation in the Davenport venue's series of provocative, suspenseful films set in the context of authoritarian fascism.

In a mid-March poll, 68 percent of likely Illinois voters said they would support legislation to “regulate data centers to minimize their impact on our utility bills, climate, and water while still allowing them to be built.” But while 21 percent percemt opposed the legislation, more than half of those opponents (56 percent) said they did so because they “oppose allowing data centers to be built at all.” That means 80 percent either want guardrails or oppose any new construction.

Colorful, playful, and delightfully goofy works will be on display at the Quad City Arts International Airport Gallery from April 29 through June 29, with the shared exhibition Butcher, Hymes, & Murtha showcasing new illustrations on shaped wood by Aaron Butcher and examples of fiber art by MaryKay Hymes and Diane Murtha.