Julie Funk is both excited and terrified to take on one of the most iconic roles in musical theatre. The passionate 50-year-old Davenport mom is playing the monstrous Mama Rose in Quad City Music Guild's Gypsy, running August 8 through 17 at Moline's Prospect Park Auditorium (1584 34th Avenue).

With their repertoire boasting six studio albums, two live albums (including last year's Live at Riverside), five EPs, 22 singles, and 28 music videos, the heavy-metal artists of Ice Nine Kills play East Moline venue The Rust Belt on August 9, their most recent recording The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood a Billboard smash and the highest-charting album in the band's history.

An inventive duo that explores the outer edges of sound through improvisation and experimental music, harpist Stephan Haluska and percussionist Adam Shead will blend their talents in an August 9 concert event at Rock Island venue Rozz-Tox, their collaboration drawing on a shared commitment to sonic exploration and contemporary composition, creating performances as meditative as they are unpredictable.

On August 7, the 2022 winner of Graceland’s Ultimate Elvis Competition will bring his stunning impersonation skills to the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse when the Rock Island venue hosts two performances of The King in Concert, with critically lauded stage sensation Victor Trevino Jr. taking audiences on a thrilling trip through the decades and some of the most beloved rock, soul, and gospel tunes of all time.

A trio of the Quad Cities' favorite artists will blend their talents for the latest exhibition at Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center, with Wayfinding, through October 3, showcasing ceramic sculpture by Lori Roderick, woven tapestries by Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, and abstract paintings by Zaiga Minka Thorson.

Presented in conjunction with the venue's current exhibition of the same title (with an added exclamation point), director Tom Hooper's arguably legendary screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats enjoys an August 14 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, with kitty costumes encouraged for this free event in the Thursdays at the Figge series.

Regarded by many, including New York Times critic Ben Brantley, as potentially the greatest of all American musicals, the legendary, Tony-winning Gypsy enjoys an August 8 through 17 Quad City Music Guild staging at Moline's Prospect Payk Auditorium, the Times' Frank Rich adding that "Gypsy is nothing if not Broadway's own brassy, unlikely answer to King Lear."

Hailed by The New Yorker as "clever in conceit, alive with humor, surprising in its turns, and terribly haunting by the time the lights go out," playwright Jordan Harrison's science-fiction tale Marjorie Prime makes its debut at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre. Its August 14 through 24 run is sure to demonstrate why the New York Times deemed the stage piece an "elegant, thoughtful, and quietly unsettling play" that "keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you have seen it."

According to the 2020 Census, Cook County is 40-percent white, 26-percent Latino, 22-percent Black, and 8-percent Asian. Chicago is 21 percent of the state’s population. But the statewide ticket recently endorsed by the Cook County Democratic Party is overwhelmingly made up of white Chicagoans (JB Pritzker, Alexi Giannoulias, Mike Frerichs, and Margaret Croke), with two Black Chicagoans (Lieutenant Governor candidate Christian Mitchell and Kwame Raoul) and no Latinos or Asian Americans.