The 2006 musical love story I Love You Because, its music by Joshua Salzman and its book and lyrics by Ryan Cunningham, is a modern spin on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, exploring the age-old notion that opposites attract. And in its current presentation at the Black Box Theatre, the show provides a light and entertaining theatre experience.

House Speaker Michael Madigan was his usual self during the final week of the General Assembly’s spring session, passing bills to make one point or another without actually accomplishing anything.

Bills are routinely moved in the House for the sole purpose of creating TV ads or direct-mail pieces or newspaper headlines. Madigan’s only real ideology is maintaining his majority, and he doesn’t consider that to be a bad thing. And maintaining that majority has been inextricably tied for two long years with stopping Governor Bruce Rauner at every turn, despite Madigan’s repeated claims that he’s cooperating and that Rauner should just accept a win and move on.

Whatever else you can say about Madigan, he’s not wrong about that last part.

The concept of taking songs from an artist’s catalog and piecing them together to create a narrative doesn’t always work. But I must say that the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's current Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook is one of the genre's best, culling the music of Broadway composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz to tell the tale of a couple whose relationship is at a turning point. Its 26 numbers are from albums and familiar musicals such as Wicked, Godspell, and Pippin, and although some of the lyrics have been altered to match new characters and situations, this wasn't a distraction for me, and I was able to enjoy them as fresh and fitting for the storyline.

When Chris Freeman and Antonio Alcorn met in a college folk-music club in 2010, the idea of starting a band wasn’t on their minds. They were just a couple of students among the others, looking to play the folk, bluegrass, and Irish music they liked. But after the club was asked to play at a local venue in Connecticut, the band that would become Parsonsfield was beginning to take root.

A new statewide poll finds that strong opposition to an income-tax hike to solve the state’s budget problems significantly eases when the tax increase is coupled with a property-tax freeze.

That’s important because Governor Bruce Rauner has insisted that he won’t approve any tax hikes or a budget without a four-year property-tax freeze. Democrats in the General Assembly, however, have resisted the governor’s freeze proposal. And the Senate Democrats last week went ahead and passed a budget with tax hikes but not Rauner’s freeze.

“Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.” – Yogi Berra

Yogi’s words are illogical. But brilliant.

It is equally illogical to inlay a full-sized baseball diamond – made of brick and stone! – in the pavement west of Modern Woodmen Park, not far from the “real” one inside.

To download a PDF of the puzzle, click here.

Democrats have been privately grumbling for a while now that Governor Bruce Rauner isn’t truly interested in good-faith negotiations on a balanced budget with economic reforms to end the two-and-a-half-year Statehouse stalemate.

But Senate President John Cullerton spent days and days negotiating the details of a four-year property-tax freeze with Rauner, only to have his spokesperson tell me last week that he hadn’t acceded to Rauner’s demand for a four-year freeze. So Rauner isn’t the only one to blame.