With 2023 marking the first year of this locally-grown music-scene competition. the finals for the inaugural Quad Cities Karaoke Championship will be held on August 24 at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Rhythm Room, the event finding nine contestants competing for the title and the chance, for the three top winners, to share $1,500 in cash prizes.

A biographical sports drama, triumph-of-the-underdog crowd-pleaser, and video-game “adaptation” all rolled into one, director Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo opens this upcoming Friday – though if you reside in the Quad Cities, it's understandable if you thought it actually opened several weeks prior.

On Thursday, I made my third trek in three weeks to the Timber Lake Playhouse – this time to see Jersey Boys, which is about Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons' fascinating rise to fame. The show, boasting music by these early rock-and-roll legends, ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2017, winning four Tonys. I haven't seen the 2014 movie, but even if you have, see this. Seriously.

For this year's annual Riverfront Pops concert event in Davenport's LeClaire Park, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and Quad City Bank & Trust invite audiences to join them "when the lights do down in the city" during the August 26 extravaganza The Music of Journey, a celebration of the band's anniversary featuring such Billboard smashes as “Separate Ways,” “Wheel In the Sky," "Lights," and many more.

For the first presentations in the company's 2023-24 season, the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities will, for the fourth straight year, open with an outdoor celebration at Davenport's Outing Club, treating patrons to another series of thrilling vignettes in Ballet on the Lawn. This year, however, the dancers are doubling down on their family-friendly fun by preceding the August 27 productions with Children's Day at the Ballet, a youth-centric event culminating in the half-hour stage party Giraffes Can't Dance.

Touring in support of their springtime release Rides On, a recording that No Depression deemed "thoughtful and wide-ranging, cohesive and tight" and that Glide magazine called "their strongest album yet," the indie folk-rockers of The Nudy Party headline an August 26 concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn, their third and most recent song collection leading American Songwriter to state that "when the album is over, you’ll want to hit the repeat button."

With the duo's self-titled debut album praised by the Austin Chronicle as "a kaleidoscope of avant-garde lyrics and grandiose soundscapes" boasting a "stunning command of lo-fi instrumentation," alternative/indie musicians Jane Ellen Bryant and Daniel Leopold bring their outfit Jane Leo to Davenport's Raccoon Motel on August 31, the lauded group, according to the Austin Chronicle, "primed to unleash their slick, lo-fi cool upon the Austin scene and beyond."

Lauded by The Daily Iowan as an ensemble that boasts "a seamless sound that makes classifying music by genre a thing of the past," the ever-popular reggae, rock, and dub musicians of Rude Punch headline a concert in Common Chord's Live at Five series, the local group's August 25 Davenport engagement sponsored by the IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union (IHMVCU) with Common Chord's Front Row members, Encore Society, annual donors, and sponsors also making the event possible.

An insightful exhibition aimed at fostering dialogue about how University of Dubuque students practice and promote the tenets of IIED, the university's Bisignano Art Gallery is housing Student Perspectives on: Inclusion, Intentionality, Equity, & Diversity through September 8, the exhibit displaying framed questions posed to 15 students from a variety of vocational pathways and their responses to those queries.