Do a quick Google search and you’ll find innumerable lists of the greatest books of all time. But if you aren’t quite as well read as you’d like, the Spotlight Theatre has a solution for you with their inaugural production of All the Great Books (Abridged).

There’s a big reunion in Geneseo! To celebrate the 50th-anniversary season of the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, director John VanDeWoestyne got some of the 2008 Dearly Beloved gang back together for this summer’s sweetly nostalgic revival. The theatre’s audience voted to add the show to the season, and, along with over half the original production’s actors returning, the plot features its own reunion in the form of a family wedding. Dearly Beloved must have been remembered fondly because Thursday night’s opening was packed.

Pointing out the holes in Maryann Loncar’s allegations against Representative Lou Lang (D-Skokie) is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that absolutely everything she said was untrue.

As the movie's star has recounted, among the many injuries Johnny Knoxville suffered while filming his new comedy Action Point were concussions, broken bones, and the loss of “two-and-a-half teeth.” Did they happen to be his fangs? I ask because director Tim Kirkby's stunt-filled slapstick, despite its expected R rating, is about as close to a family-friendly Jackass as Knoxville has attempted, and I don't mean that admiringly; even before its famously fearless, possibly deranged lead walked on set, this thing was destined to be toothless.

A legendary comic opera about a single day of madness in a Spanish palace, Mozart's classic The Marriage of Figaro will enjoy rare area performances at St. Ambrose University on June 8 and 10. But the presentation of this romantic, hilarious, and gloriously composed work is rarer still in being a community collaboration between Genesius Guild, Opera @ Augustana, the St. Ambrose music department, and Opera Quad Cities – the latter group making its large-scale public return for the first time this decade.

Performing June 8 through 10, company members of Ballet Quad Cities bring their annual, eagerly awaited presentations of Ballet Under the Stars vignettes back to Rock Island's Lincoln Park. But this year, as Artistic Director Courtney Lyon explains, the outdoor stage will also be filled with many additional area talents sharing the spotlight with her company's professional dancers.

With Broadway World calling the performers' live show “an awe-inspiring experience” in which the phrase “'must-see' doesn't really cover it,” the global phenomenon Celtic Woman brings its “Homecoming Live” tour to Davenport's Adler Theatre on June 12, demonstrating why the Irish musicians' international appearances have been continual sell-outs, and why they have thus far sold in excess of 10 million albums worldwide.

Anvil, June 8

Heavy-metal mainstays of the early '80s that have been enjoying a decade-long renaissance perform a special concert at the Rock Island Brewing Company, with the June 8 concert by Anvil treating patrons to a night with the stars of the 2008 documentary hit Anvil! The Story of Anvil, called “a hell of a movie” by Empire and, by IndieWire, “a must-see for dreamers everywhere.”

Praised by Paste magazine as “reliably and thoroughly exceptional” and by Spin for “music as blissful and unhurried as a cat lolling about in a sunbeam,” the indie-rock artists of Real Estate play a June 8 Codfish Hollow Barn concert co-sponsored by Moeller Nights, with their most recent album In Mind inspiring Consequence of Sound to rave, “Everything Real Estate touches turns to bliss.”

On display from June 9 through September 16, the Figge Art Museum's new exhibit Alois Kronschlaeger: Polychromatic Contemplations will acquaint visitors with the talents of one of America's most prolific artists, a native Austrian whose work, as he states, “deals with space, light, color, how you intervene and activate a space, and how a space can be a combination of both interior and exterior.”

An eagerly awaited summertime festival returns to the District of Rock Island on June 9, as this year's celebration of Cajun culture Gumbo Ya Ya treats guests to a veritable Mardi Gras complete with a quartet of electrifying concerts, a French Quarter Marketplace, Cajun cooking, street performers, and, as always, more than 20,000 strands of Mardi Gras beads.

Performing what OnMilwaukee.com calls “a supreme blend of traditional country, Americana, and contemporary folk styles,” Wisconsin's alt-country five-piece Buffalo Gospel headlines a Moeller Nights concert on June 9 in support of its new album On the First Bell, a work the Web site decress “worthy of not only a listen, but a permanent place on your playlist.”

One of the most legendary musicals by one of American theatre's most legendary composers arrives in Quad City Music Guild's Golden Age production of the Tony-winning Mame, a June 8 through 17 run that will treat family audiences to Jerry Herman's unforgettable score, memorable songs, sure-to-be-stunning costumes, and a leading role that made Angela Lansbury a Broadway star.

To download a PDF of the puzzle, click here.

Fate and destiny: Are they real? Is love at first sight possible? So asks the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's The Bridges of Madison County, the romantic story of two strangers who, by chance, run into one another in rural Winterset, Iowa, in 1965. And the May 24 preview performance left me captivated, delivering beautiful ballads, impressive vocals, and stunning scenic design by Eric Luchen complete with a large backdrop screen that projected fantastic images of the Roseman covered bridge, simple farmhouses, and green pastures.

Walking into Solo: A Star Wars Story, my biggest fear wasn't that it would be bad. It was that it would be terribly disjointed – a sci-fi adventure in which it was painfully obvious which moments were the work of original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the Lego Movie and 21 and 22 Jump Street tyros who were fired well into production) and which were the work of replacement director Ron Howard. Their output, after all, couldn't be more dissimilar: Lord/Miller releases are loose, rambunctious, self-mocking, and sometimes bat-shit crazy; Howard's undertakings, even his comedies and thrillers, are sane, sturdy, earnest, and unsurprising to a fault.

For weeks now, some Democrats have been wondering if their party intends to run a “coordinated campaign” this year and have asked what it might look like. A coordinated campaign means all the party’s candidates are working together under one umbrella group.

Called “witty and wacky” by the London Sunday Telegraph, “verbally dexterous and physically agile” by the Boston Globe, and “English class meets Monty Python” by the Washington Post, Moline's new Spotlight Theatre debuts the first of its stage productions with the June 1 through 10 run of All the Great Books (Abridged), a rollicking farce by the Reduced Shakespeare Company team of Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor.

Lauded by SputnikMusic.com for her “carefree, earthy experimentalism” and “the polarized emotions she inspires,” dream-pop singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Carla dal Forno brings her North American tour to Rozz-Tox on June 3, the artist's 2016 album You Know What It's Like revered by Pitchfork.com for being a “smoky and ominous” work that “simmers, both musically and thematically, with powerful undercurrents.”

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