An eagerly awaited pre-summer event complete with food, vendors, local history, games, and entertainment for the entire family, the 2025 Quad City Juneteenth Festival will be held at Davenport's LeClaire Park on June 14, the celebration hosted by the Friends of MLK (FoMLK) and held in commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.

For the company's annual classical production staged in Iowa City's Lower City Park, Riverside Theatre takes on perhaps the most beloved – and certainly the most famous – tragic romance of all time, with William Shakespeare's timeless Romeo & Juliet enjoying an outdoor run from June 13 through 29.

You'll rarely hear me complain about a film, especially an umpteenth followup in an apparently endless franchise, being too modestly scaled or too short. However, in the case of this latest installment in the KKU, I do feel obligated to ask: Really? This is it? This whole, paltry, badly shot thing exists simply to get Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio on-screen together – and even then only barely, and not until almost a full hour has passed?

For quite a while now, most folks in politics have assumed that Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias and Comptroller Susana Mendoza will probably run for mayor of Chicago in 2027. The incumbent Brandon Johnson is spectacularly unpopular, and a real hunger is developing in the city (again) for new leadership.

It must be summer again, because on Friday night, I found myself on my annual pilgrimage north through hordes of mayflies to attend the start of the new Timber Lake Playhouse season. Critiquing shows is always a bit of a dice roll: Will it be moving or boring? Director Tommy Ranieri's Saturday Night Fever is more of the former, and an extraordinary start to the summer-stock season.

With the stage hit lauded by Broadway World as "entirely entertaining and enjoyable," the spooky, kooky, ooky musical-comedy version of The Addams Family serves as the opening presentation in the Clinton Area Showboat's 2025 summer season, its June 12 through 22 run treating audiences to a Tony Award-nominated delight inspired by the beloved TV comedy and the iconic cartoon strip by series originator Charles Addams.

A beloved biblical musical boasting seven Tony Award nominations and a chart-topping U.K. single in “Any Dream Will Do,” the Broadway smash Joseph & the Amazing Technical Dreamcoat, from June 6 through 15, serves as the summertime opener for the talents at Quad City Music Guild, this theatrical classic the first-ever publicly staged work by the legendary stage team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

Presented as part of the Davenport venue's popular “Kaffee und Kuchen” series, the German American Center's June 8 program Dresden: A Royal Saxon Jewel, presented by Russell and Cathy Baldner, will demonstrate why it is for very good reason that Dresden, Germany, has been called a “Cultural Center of World Renown” and, in recognition of its artistic and cultural wealth, “Florence [Italy] of the North.”

Boasting a repertoire bubbling over with hits including the heartfelt singalong "Heard It in a Love Song," the testifying "Fire on the Mountain," and the explosive testimony of "Ramblin,'" the genre-crossing rockers of The Marshall Tucker Band headline a June 7 concert event at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Event Center, the ensemble famed for incorporating blues, country and jazz into an eclectic sound, and helping establish the Southern rock genre in the early 1970s.