With the New York Times calling it “the kind of unheralded gem that sends people into the streets babbling and bright-eyed with the desire to spread the word,” author Annie Baker's thoughtful comedy Circle Mirror Transformation will be staged at Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center March 9 through 11 – the annual presentation for which students from the theatre department’s Play production class were responsible for auditioning, casting, directing, scenic design, lighting and sound design, costume design, and stage management.

Making a local stop on her latest national tour, Kentucky-based comedienne and Southern Fried Chicks headliner Etta May brings her reputation as “The Queen of Southern Sass” to the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, her March 8 event – and her tour's title – promoting the low-rent pleasures of “Box Wine & Gas-Station Chicken.”

Presented at Moline's Black Box Theatre in the style of a radio play complete with live music, sound effects, and actors with scripts in hand, three new episodes of the locally produced podcast All You Care to Eat will be performed by the area troupe Comedy Thingy on February 24 and taped in front of a live “studio” audience.

For the second year in a row, the Center for Living Arts, the Penguin Project of the Quad Cities, and Augustana College's theatre department are teaming up to help turn kids into stage stars, which they'll do in the February 23 through March 4 Brunner Theatre Center run of Beauty & the Beast Jr. – a production that boasts a cast composed entirely of talented youths with special needs.

One of Amerian theatre's most acclaimed and awarded titles will enjoy an intimate yet emotionally grand staging when St. Ambrose University and director Sam Jones present the stage classic A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller's Tony-winning family drama that runs in the Studio Theatre February 15 through 18.

With its latest show described as “colorful, energetic, and wonderfully silly” by TheatreJones.com and praised for its “sweetness, humor, and energetic high spirits” by the New York Times, Davenport Junior Theatre treats family audiences to the company's debut of Seussical Jr., a one-act, all-student-performed version of the Tony-nominated storybook musical.

Maybe our virtual lives are just as important as our physical lives. To some, maybe, they're more important.

After receiving dozens of national and local entries for its second-annual contest, the QC Theatre Workshop will present the six winners and finalists in the company's 2018 Susan Glaspell Playwriting Festival during a special two-part event, with readings of three different scripts performed on two successive nights.

Augustana College's production of In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) takes the audience back to the simpler time of the 1800s, when electricity was being discovered, doctors still worked out of their homes, and females were apparently so sexually repressed they were driving themselves insane.

So much has been said about Pat Flaherty's performances over the years that I hesitate to add more here for fear of being accused of plagiarism. Suffice it to say Flaherty has brought a smile to my face in everything I have ever seen him act in, and his portrayal in Sleuth was certainly no exception.

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