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Statistically speaking, 40 to 50 percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce. Such is the case with the union in The Last Five Years, the current musical running at Moline's Black Box Theatre. Somehow, though, with its upbeat songs interspersed with dramatic ballads, this production is surprisingly sweet, even though you know from the start that the marriage will eventually sour.

About a year ago, I attended a hearing of the Illinois House Judiciary – Criminal Law Committee and watched the Democratic majority vote down one Republican-sponsored criminal-penalty-enhancement bill after another.

A bona-fide classic of American musical theatre, Rodgers and Hammerstein's cherished romance The King & I lands at Davenport's Adler Theatre on April 7 in a glorious new nationally touring presentation, beguiling patrons with an unforgettable score in a show the New York Times called “breathtaking and exquisite” and New York magazine deemed “too beautiful to miss.”

With his 2018 book Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to This Country? described by the Washington Post as “lively, stimulating, and pleasantly discursive,” author, pundit, and podcaster Steve Almond serves as the latest guest in Augustana College's River Readings series, his April 9 presentation demonstrating the talents that have won Almond the Blue Mesa Review's Poetry Prize, the New Delta Review's Editors' Choice Prize, and the 2017 Poetry International Prize.

Wrapping up a 2018-19 Masterworks season that has boasted legendary works by some of the world's most noted composers, the musicians of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, on April 6 and 7, will turn their collective attention to the Quad Cities themselves in Quad Cities Past & Present, a repertoire featuring the world premiere of a QCSO-commissioned work by Chicago-based composer James M. Stephenson.

Best known as the founder, lead singer/songwriter, and guitarist of punk-rock outfit Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace and her Florida-based band The Devouring Mothers play an April 9 Moeller Nights concert at the East Moline venue The Rust Belt, the artist's 2016 album Shape Shift with Me called “densely packed, vicious, and heartbreaking” by Pitchfork magazine, and Grace herself notable for being one of the first highly visible punk rock musicians to publicly identify as transgender.

JC is in the house – by which I mean Quad City Music Guild's really modern-day Jesus Christ Superstar, a production complete with skinny jeans, loafers, and cell phones. Friday's opening-night performance of this classic with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice was still working out its bugs; there were missed microphone cues in which you couldn't hear the beginnings of songs, and personally speaking, I was a bit confused by Heather Blair's costume design, as it appeared that every actor just went into their closets and picked out something peculiar to wear. But straight out of the gate, Adam Sanders' Judas Iscariot, at least, was powerful in his rendition of “Heaven on Their Minds.”

Should proponents of legalizing cannabis in Illinois be worried about Representative Marty Moylan's (D-Des Plaines) House resolution?