Performing as the latest guests in Polyrhythms' Third Sunday Jazz Workshop & Matinée Series, the Lynne Arriale Trio – featuring bassist Matt Ulery and drummer Jon Deitemyer – brings formidable talent to Davenport's Redstone Room on May 20, the ensemble's pianist, composer, and namesake described as “the poet laureate of her generation” by Jazz Police, with multiple Grammy winner Randy Brecker adding, “Her music transcends the word 'jazz' – it is just pure music.”

Charlize Theron is nearly always great, and few of her movies have needed her to be great quite as much as Tully, a domestic dramedy that only works – to the extent that it works at all – because of the performer's ferocious, at times truly frightening emotional commitment.

Artworks boasting the strange, the familiar, and the strangely familiar will be on display at Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center May 11 through June 22, with illustrative imagery and bright colors employed to communicate ideas about objects, environments, and concepts in the charming, humorous exhibits Karmageddon, featuring mixed media by David Balluff, and News Anchors with Nabisco, showcasing paintings by Greg Dickinson.

Things are about to get capitalized and italicized Wild at the Figge Art Museum, as the Davenport venue, from May 12 through August 12, will house the traveling Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak: The Memorial Exhibition – 50 Years, 50 Works, 50 Reasons, a showcase for one of America's premiere illustrators and characters from one of the world's best-loved children's books.

Currently embarking on a May tour that finds the musician visiting 22 different venues, and 22 different cities, over 26 days, the critically lauded Justin Townes Earle performs a Moeller Nights concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on May 14, his seventh and most recent album Kids in the Street described by NPR as “the veteran songwriter's most pleasing and playful effort to date.”

A revolutionary abolitionist and women's-rights advocate who dedicated her life to the dissemination of knowledge through her writing, newspapers, and school, Mathilde F. Anneke will be the subject of a May 13 presentation at the German American Heritage Center, with author and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee assistant professor Dr. Viktorija Bilić presenting on her work translating the personal correspondence of this German-American Suffragist.

On May 10, in conjunction with the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA) exhibition Resistance, Resilience, & Restoration, the Figge Art Museum will host an evening with exhibit curator Vero Rose Smith, the assistant director of the Legacies for Iowa Collections-Sharing Project who will share her thoughts on the selection of pieces for this celebration of the beauty and fragility of nature.

To download a PDF of the puzzle, click here.

This past Friday, on a lovely spring night, we had church over at the Black Box Theatre. Powerful, soulful, and believable, the April 27 performance of Crowns: A Gospel Musical was also both entertaining and engaging – a truly spiritual experience that left me with goosebumps and a better understanding of African-American head adornments.