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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Running in a rare eight-performance run at Davenport's Adler Theatre, the musical-comedy smash The Book of Mormon makes its local debut June 5 through 10, a show that, in its original incarnation, inspired this first paragraph of its New York Times review: “This is to all the doubters and deniers out there, the ones who say that heaven on Broadway does not exist, that it’s only some myth our ancestors dreamed up. I am here to report that a newborn, old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical has arrived … the kind our grandparents told us left them walking on air if not on water. So hie thee hence, nonbelievers (and believers too), to The Book of Mormon, and feast upon its sweetness.”