Marijuana is an “unspeakable scourge,” warns The Lecturer (played by an augmentedly-bearded Andy Curtiss) at the start of the QC Theatre Workshop's hilarious production of Reefer Madness. A scourge, warns the man, that's “turning all our children into hooligans and whores!”

There’s a big reunion in Geneseo! To celebrate the 50th-anniversary season of the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, director John VanDeWoestyne got some of the 2008 Dearly Beloved gang back together for this summer’s sweetly nostalgic revival. The theatre’s audience voted to add the show to the season, and, along with over half the original production’s actors returning, the plot features its own reunion in the form of a family wedding. Dearly Beloved must have been remembered fondly because Thursday night’s opening was packed.

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.

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.