What’s it like being big? I guess it all depends on perspective and age. After all, adulthood is filled with all kinds of responsibilities and stress that accompany being grown; when we're young, we wish to be old, and when we’re old(er), we yearn to be young. So goes the storyline for Big: The Musical, the lighthearted comedy now playing at Moline's Spotlight Theatre. And Friday’s opening-night performance was loads of fun for everyone.

One of the most successful and adored film comedies of the 1980s will be given new musical-comedy stage life at the Spotlight Theatre April 5 through 14 when the Moline venue presents the area debut of Big: The Musical, a Tony-nominated charmer by the composing team of David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr. that DC Theatre Scene said “is filled with zany moments along with memorable musical numbers.”

Continuing the company's plan of producing all of William Shakespeare's plays by 2023, area verse-theatre troupe the Prenzie Players delivers one of the Bard's freshest and funniest titles in its April 5 through 13 QC Theatre Workshop staging of The Comedy of Errors – a work that esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom said “reveals Shakespeare's magnificence at the art of comedy” and demonstrated “mastery in action, incipient character, and stagecraft.”

Freshman Representative Terra Costa Howard (D-Glen Ellyn) was reportedly none too pleased when Think Big Illinois began running TV ads in her district.

Described by Talkin' Broadway as “dazzlingly, deliciously alive from start to finish” and by Chicago on Stage as “a poignant and important love story for our era,” Augustana College's 2018-19 studio-theatre season wraps up with the April 11 through 14 run of author Anna Ziegler's Boy, a work New City Stage called “90 minutes of brilliant theatre that will keep you vibrating for days to come.”

One of the most famous and beloved comedies in the history of world theatre will enjoy a rousing comeback when St. Ambrose University stages Molière's 1664 classic Tartuffe, its April 12 through 14 run bringing the French playwright's vision to life in a rollicking adaptation by Oscar winner and Tony nominee Christopher Hampton.

Representing a collective 238 years of service to the art programs in local schools and institutes of learning, the new exhibition CREATE: A Celebration of Davenport Community Schools Art Teachers will be on display at Davenport's MidCoast at Bucktown Gallery April 11 through May 31, treating visitors to a dynamic collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and works in other visual mediums.

For the second year in a row, the Quad Cities' NPR station WVIK hosts a special panel discussion and keynote address in its “Intelligent Conversation” series, with this year's April 11 program A Path Appears: An Intelligent Conversation About Real People Working to Change the World taking place at Davenport's RiverCenter and boasting two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times' very first blogger and subject of Ben Affleck's HBO documentary Reporter.

Lauded by the Washington Post for their “understated, country-tinged charm,” the husband-and-wife singing/songwriting duo of Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler bring their folk and Americana outfit to Davenport's Redstone Room on April 11, with the concert event An Evening with Over the Rhine demonstrating why Paste magazine raved about the group's “lovely, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting musical mosaic.”