Performing from a repertoire that includes such classics as “Uncle John's Band,” “Truckin,” “Alabama Getaway,” and the chart-topping “Touch of Grey,” the rockers of The Schwag return to the Rock Island Brewing Company on November 16, appearing locally in their 27th year as professional Grateful Dead tribute artists.

A platinum-selling, chart-topping singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who's currently the youngest living member of the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville star Chris Janson headlines a November 17 concert at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort, his talents leading Nashville Gab to call him “explosive on stage and completely unpredictable,” as well as “the future of country music.”

Praised by The Missoulian for his “lovelorn songs with evenly paced melodies and surprising twists” and by WideOpenCountry.com for “putting whimsical touches to songs that are deadly serious,” folk singer/songwriter Izaak Opatz serves as the Moeller Nights headliner on November 19 and 20, demonstrating why Rolling Stone lauded his “quirky Americana crossed with the indie-pop sensibility of the Shins, as performed by a Montana mountain man.”

About an hour into the Freddie Mercury bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody, the screen is suddenly filled with excerpts from reviews of the title song, with the least harsh among many hateful notices calling the Queen track “perfectly adequate.” Depending on where you look, a glance through the film's own reviews can feel similar to that montage, with some of the nation's foremost news outlets attacking the release with a loathing that suggests the second coming of Ed Wood. (The headline for the New York Times' take was “Another One Bites the Dust” … and that was one of the kinder things said.)

But if ever a movie was wholly, deservedly review-proof, it's this one. Yes, I thought that Bohemian Rhapsody was in most ways disappointingly traditional and in many ways bad. It left me, however, with such a movie-going high – and a high composed of numerous incidental thrills well before its phenomenally satisfying finale – that I found its scores of problems, in the end, almost completely irrelevant. As the insistent lyric goes: “We will we will rock you.” And damn if I didn't leave rocked.

The last column I write before an election day is always the toughest because some papers will publish this before election day and others will publish it after. So today you get a yard-sign story.

For decades, the American people have permitted the secretive nature of government to not just prevail, but exponentially grow, causing the public sector to adopt a sense of entitlement for operating beyond the reach of the public. It really isn't about left versus right anymore, because the obstructionists to transparency exist on both sides of the aisle and ideologies.

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, author Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog will make its area debut at Davenport's QC Theatre Workshop November 2 through 18, the show's riveting exploration of African-American experience called “an utterly mesmerizing evening of theatre” by Variety magazine, with the New York Times adding that the play “vibrates with the clamor of big ideas, audaciously and exuberantly expressed.”

Described by the New York Times as an “elegant, thoughtful, and quietly unsettling drama” that “keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you have seen it,” author Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime will be staged by New Ground Theatre November 9 through 18, treating audiences to a futuristic tale that Time Out New York calls “an elegant study of memory as both escape and prison.”

Works by an incredible assemblage of more than two dozen Midwestern artists will be on local display from November 2 through January 2, with the aptly titled Regional Art Show on display at Bettendorf's Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy and showcasing pieces, for viewing and for sale, in mediums including jewelry, sculpture, raku, ceramic, oil, acrylic, watercolor, photography, print making, mixed medium, and collage.