"Escape to Margaritaville" at Quad City Music Guild (April 2025) starred Jack Bevans and Kirsten Sindelar.
As my esteemed Reader colleague Mike Schulz knows, being part of producing live theatre gives you an invaluable perspective when writing about theatre and the arts in general.
As a longtime piano player and accompanist (on top of being a QC arts journalist since 1995), I love to play whenever I get the chance – be it for my part-time job at Davenport’s Zion Lutheran Church, or for singers and instrumentalists at private events and public shows. In the first half of 2025, I had the honor of performing for three outstanding community-theatre productions – and all in a row, which is rare for me. Being part of a musical is always an intense, emotional, bonding experience.
Last spring, I accompanied my fourth Quad City Music Guild presentation: the fun Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical Escape to Margaritaville, for which a crack rock band was on stage the whole time, decked out in Hawaiian shirts and leis. Directed with passion and obvious fandom by Luke Vermeire, and music directed with unpretentious energy by Stephen Scott, this was a blissful party with a tremendously talented cast.
I went right from that show's mid-April closing to my passion project Marry Me a Little, a special revue of Stephen Sondheim songs at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre. For that late-May production, I couldn’t play the performances live, as they overlapped with the Black Box Theatre's Fun Home, to which I had previously committed.
But for Marry Me a Little (originally conceived in 1981 as a collection of unproduced songs), I taught the 22 numbers for two weeks, and on the last Sunday before opening, I recorded the entire accompaniment in the theatre (with the help of sound wizard Gio Macias), which they used for the actual show.
Running two weekends, this was the rare show for which I served as music director, working closely with veteran director Jake Ladd. The delightful, heartbreaking, relatable two-person revue starred the extraordinarily gifted Sydney Crumbleholme and Thayne Lamb (both veterans of Playcrafters productions, as well as Ladd’s Fiddler on the Roof, which Music Guild staged in 2024. Coincidentally, the only other area show I've music directed was Jason Robert Brown's wonderful The Last Five Years, a spring-of-'19 Black Box production that also featured only one man and one woman.
Sondheim is my personal hero, and Marry Me a Little was a dream come true to work on. Anyone who’s ever done a Sondheim show knows his songs can be fiendishly difficult, often boasting chromaticism, intricate wordplay, challenging rhythms, and shifting key and time signatures. But once you master them, the feeling of accomplishment and triumph is unmatched.
I floated right from those rehearsals into another dream, with which I was initially unfamiliar: the Tony-winning musical Fun Home, which tells the life-affirming, inspiring story of lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Based on her 2006 memoir, with its book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, the stage adaptation features deeply moving, glorious, and often fun music by Jeanine Tesori. And with the Black Box's rendition starring the great Sydney Richardson as adult Alison (the musical shows the character at three different ages) and Tristan Tapscott as her father, director Bradley Robert Jensen led a flawless, heartfelt production I wished had run for far longer than its nine performances.
Other 2025 QC arts highlights actually didn't involve me, though I was privileged to write about them:
* The May 17 “Glow Up” at the Figge Art Museum. In honor of the institution’s 100th anniversary year (and 20th year in its landmark downtown-Davenport building), the public was invited to the outdoor plaza to see the first switch on for Evanescent Field, the $4-million light installation by acclaimed artist Leo Villareal, which bathes the museum exterior in subtly shifting light patterns and is activated every day at dusk.
* Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Metro Arts. For the Reader's August issue, I delved into the amazing history of Quad City Arts’ Metro Arts program, which has considerably brightened the Quad Cities and changed the lives of many young artists. Open to students age 15 to 21, Metro Arts is a paid, five-week summer apprenticeship in which participants work with professional artists on public-facing projects. From murals and mosaics to poetry, live performances, and digital storytelling, apprentices shape and improve the creative landscape of the QC while gaining invaluable professional experience.
* The Opening of a burlesque arts museum. Danielle Colby is not only well-known as a co-star of American Pickers, but as the founder and operator of the new Ecdysiast Arts Museum in downtown Davenport, which celebrates the costumes, personalities, and art of burlesque. The space opened in June, including regular performances and classes, and it’s a dizzying celebration of burlesque, artistry, and unapologetic expression, unique in the region and nation.
Meanwhile, here are some local cultural events I’m looking forward to in 2026:
* Playcrafters' God of Carnage (February 27 – March 8). Fifteen years after its last excellent QC production at the Village Theatre, this dark, caustic comedy focused on a showdown between two sets of parents features a quartet of some of my favorite local actors: Leslie Day, Tom Taylor, Stephanie Burrough, and the Reader's Mike Schulz.
* The Spotlight Theatre’s The Secret Garden (April 10 - 19) and West Side Story (June 12 - 21). For nearly six years, the gorgeous Secret Garden has held a key place in heart, as it had a perfect cast and was the first show I played at Music Guild – but then the production was canceled in March of 2020 two weeks before opening. (Thanks, COVID.) And West Side Story, with its iconic lyrics by Sondheim and brilliant, blazing, tender music by Leonard Bernstein, is just about my favorite musical of all time.
* Playing for Music Guild's 1776 (June 12 – 21). Good news and bad news. I get to play for this gripping re-creation of the writing, debate, and signing of the Declaration of Independence, in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary. I was also in my college’s cast of the show for commencement weekend in 1986! The bad news – for me, at least? The show dates are precisely overlapping with West Side Story's.
* Wickedest” ballet and burlesque in Davenport. As author of A Brief History of Bucktown, I can’t wait to see Davenport’s heritage as “Wickedest City in America” celebrated by Ballet Quad Cities in a new April 11 and 12 production at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, with a “Wickedest City Burlesque and Variety Festival” taking place on April 16 at the Adler Theatre.
* Alison Krauss & Union Station, September 11 at the Adler. Boasting the ethereal voice of an angel who never seems to age, Krauss is one of my favorite female singers. Now 54, the peerless artist (who also plays fiddle) has earned 27 Grammys over her astounding 40-year career.
