Jeff Adamson, clearly delighted by the room’s laughter on its opening-night performance, leaned into the humor with visible enthusiasm, which only seemed to widen the gap between the show’s tone and my own reaction to it.

With the world-premiere production created by writer, director, and star Jeff Adamson of ComedySportz and GiT Improv fame, The Adventures of Sam Steele: A Radio Play enjoys a March 27 through April 4 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, its titular detective up against mobsters, con men, and femmes fatales as he attempts to solve his toughest case, "A Murder in McClellan Heights.”

With his one-man show inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, St. Ambrose University professor and theatre-department chair Dan Hale presents a one-night-only performance of Strange Case on March 28.

With Time Out NY calling the show “Broadway's funniest, splashiest, slap-happiest musical comedy in at least 400 years,” the University of Dubuque’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts presents a March 20 through 22 production of Something Rotten!, the zany, Tony-winning farce that the Hollywood Reporter called “a big, brash, meta-musical studiously fashioned in the mold of Monty Python's Spamalot.”