Nostalgia has a funny way of raising the stakes. A mediocre presentation wouldn’t just be disappointing; it would feel like someone had replaced my ruby slippers with muddy boots and then trounced all over my childhood memories. Thankfully, director Tony Parise’s production bursts to life with color, imagination, and obvious affection for the material.

Chemical Trespassing on Iowa's State Tree Cannot Be Punished

Tony Singh's 20-Year Quest to Address Pesticide Damage in His Oak Savanna

In 1996, Tony Singh began rewilding a plot of land in LeClaire, hoping to restore its oak savanna, native prairie, woodlands, and wetlands. Fewer than five years later, he noticed the leaves on his oak trees were in tatters.

On July 16, the Putnam Museum & Science Center's GIANT Screen Theater auditorium will definitely be "the Room where it happens," with the Davenport venue hosting a 6 p.m. screening of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.

Touring in support of their September release Pink Moon – a recording whose tracks, according to Scene Point Blank, are "fun and catchy with that topnotch sound that you've come to know and love" – the Canadian rockers of Silverstein headline a July 18 concert at Davenport's Capitol Theatre, their latest album also hailed by Crucial Rhythm as "a diverse, compelling body of work that explores human fragility, resistance, and the ever-changing landscape of art and life."

With their most recent release Every Time I Think About You hailed by Adventures in Americana as an album that "pulls you in immediately with delicious melodies combined with that Lynchian edge the band is known for," the sibling Americana musicians of the Cactus Blossoms headline a July 22 concert at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, their latest also inspiring Americana Highways to extol the duo's "seamless songwriting of classic rock sounds that seem to hail from simpler times."

Performing blues, folk, country, and Americana music that, according to NPR, “evokes the old-timey spirit of a thousand crackling 78 RPM records," Midwestern singer/songwriter Pokey LaFarge headlines a July 23 concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn, the artist's 2024 release Rhumba Country hailed by No Depression as a "stirring, deceptively fraught" album that "presents vivid vignettes of restless hearts gripped by desire and loneliness, and yearning for higher ground."

Recently nominated for the Wisconsin Area Music Industry's WAMI Awards for the fourth consecutive year in the categories of Best Female Vocalist and Best Female Tribute Artist, touring sensation Molly Brown brings The Legendary Ladies of Country Music to Maquoketa's Ohnward Fine Arts Center on July 18, the stage sensation treating audiences to an afternoon of favorites ranging from unforgettable classics to modern-day chart-toppers.

An intimidating ogre, a feisty princess, a wisecracking donkey, a diminutive tyrant, an ambulatory gingerbread man, and other fantastical figures take over Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse with the July 17 through August 2 run of Shrek the Musical, the Tony-winning fairytale slapstick based on the Oscar-winning animated smash, and a show that Variety called a work of “irreverent charm” that “never stints on spectacle or laughs."

In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, Davenport's Figge Art Museum is hosting American Art talks throughout the month of July, and on Thursday the 23rd, guests are invited to hear from Larassa Kabel in Focus on the American Landscape, the speaker a multidisciplinary artist based in Des Moines, Iowa, whose work captures the uneasy balance between humans and nature.