Sometimes it seems as if very, very little separates a wretched Tyler Perry movie from a … . Well, not from a great Tyler Perry movie, because he hasn't yet made one of those. (He probably came closest with 2010's For Colored Girls, but those results were likely aided by Perry's choice to adapt a Tony-nominated Ntozake Shange play.) The auteur, however, has certainly made his share of terrifically entertaining movies, and for almost its entire length, I couldn't tell whether Tyler Perry's Acrimony was a stunningly confused and ineffective melodrama or an oddly irresistible one.

Winner of the 2016 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, Lucas Hnath's The Christians serves as the first title in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's 2018 season of Barn Owl Theatre productions, its April 6 through 8 run treating audiences to a work BroadwayWorld.com deemed “utterly engrossing,” with the Chicago Tribune calling its author “one of the most interesting, focused, counterintuitive, and intellectually compelling playwrights of our moment.”

Descibed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as the creators of “soul music that's so much of the old school that it might as well drive a car with fins,” Durand Jones & the Indications headline a Moeller Nights concert on April 9, the group's self-titled 2016 album leading Spill magazine to rave, “Jones absolutely dominates the songs with his powerful, soulful, and ever-evolving voice.”

Appearing in a concert benefiting local organizations for peace, cultural diversity, and human rights, folk singer/songwriter Charlie King performs his annual area show at Rock Island's Broadway Presbyterian Church on April 7, an event being held six months after King received the esteemed Phil Ochs Award in recognition of his music and activism for social and political justice.

Fronted by guitarist/vocalists and founding members Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd, the acclaimed alternative rockers of No Joy play a Daytrotter concert on April 8, the band's sound described by the New York Times as “a tingling, immersive experience,” and the musicians' talents inspiring Fader to state, “They know how to write a gorgeous song.”

For the final presentations in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's 2017-18 Masterworks season, conductor Mark Russell Smith and his gifted musicians celebrate legendary composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Masterworks VI: Postcards from Russia, a pair of April 7 and 8 concerts featuring showcase performances by 2017's Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Medalist Daniel Hsu.

Clue: The Musical is the latest production to open in this wonderfully intimate venue in downtown Moline, and speaking candidly, I was blown away by the packed house as audience members loudly chattered away before the opening curtain. It was as if they all had been cooped up in their homes for the last 24 hours, but needed to venture out just to see a classic board game brought to life via a Broadway-esque style musical.

The oddest political couple in all of Illinois did pretty well in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

“One day you’ll look at yourself and you won’t be who you were.”

Ladies and gentlemen, that is foreshadowing in Catch Me If You Can – but there are more than simple plot devices in director Michael Turczynski’s staging that runs this weekend at Quad City Music Guild's Prospect Park Auditorium.