Now celebrating its 34th year as a Father's Day institution, River Action's June 17 Ride the River event invites participants to explore the wilds of four Quad Cities islands on a bi-state tour along riverfront bicycle trails, with special events, giveaways, and more taking place at numerous stops along the journey.

Nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and the winner of a 1984 Theatre World Award, the delightful musical comedy Baby enjoys a June 14 through 23 staging at Moline's Black Box Theatre, treating patrons to a life-affirming show the New York Times praised for its “buoyancy and charm,” and for “addressing the show's concerns with both humor and intelligence.”

A 2003 inductee in the Iowa Blues Hall of Fame, acclaimed blues vocalist and Quad Cities native Ernie Peniston reunites his Ernie Peniston Band for a special Redstone Room concert on June 21, an evening that finds the artist sharing the soulful talents that led Blues Blast Magazine to state, “Peniston is a singer with a magnificent voice, capable of handing a wide range of styles with aplomb and always with full-bore emotional commitment.”

Marijuana is an “unspeakable scourge,” warns The Lecturer (played by an augmentedly-bearded Andy Curtiss) at the start of the QC Theatre Workshop's hilarious production of Reefer Madness. A scourge, warns the man, that's “turning all our children into hooligans and whores!”

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.

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.

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.

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.”