If you’re looking for a sentimental story that slowly sneaks up on you, might I suggest The Christmas Letter Writing Club at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre?

Leaving Iowa, the winning comedy currently running at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, follows Don (played by Kevin Babbitt), a middle-aged writer who reflects on vacations from his youth. In the play's present, Don travels across the cornfield states to spread his father’s ashes at his childhood home. And in a series of flashbacks, Don and his family find themselves in interesting situations with zany characters during their Midwest road trips.

Running in downtown Davenport August 25 through September 3, the latest stage comedy by the Haus of Ruckus team of T. Green and Calvin Vo is Random Access Morons, and as those first two words and the title's acronym suggest, the show is technology-themed. But despite this latest Mockingbird on Main presentation reacquainting audiences with Green's and Vo's familiar and beloved characters Fungus and Johnny, the duo's third theatrical adventure since November doesn't find the goofball slackers playing video games. Not externally, at any rate.

During Thursday's opening-night performance and area premiere of Ride the Cyclone, Ryan J. Hurdle’s character Ricky stops at one point in his song “Space Age Bachelor Man” and says, “It gets weird now.” But oh, gentle readers, that ship sailed from the moment the lights went down.

A world premiere by a local stage talent, the heartwarming dramatic comedy The Christmas Letter Writing Club makes its debut at Moline's Playcrafters Barn Theatre August 19 through 28, this holiday-themed tale of friendship written by Tom Akers – a familiar actor from Playcrafters' The Odd Couple and the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's Drinking Habits and A Doublewide, Texas Christmas.

With the Chicago Sun-Times describing Tim Clue's and Spike Manton's comedy as “simultaneously hilarious and touching,” the regional delight Leaving Iowa enjoys an August 18 through 28 run at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, the show also lauded by the Chicago Tribune as a work of “genuine charm and humility” that “lives as happily in its own warm skin as an ear of corn ripening along Interstate 80 on an August afternoon.”

For the final production in its 2022 summer season, Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse is treating patrons to an audience with the Queen – or rather, simply Queen – in the imaginative musical review We Will Rock You, a celebration of the iconic rock and pop band boasting two dozen timeless hits including “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Are the Champions,” “Somebody to Love,” and the iconic title tune.

Lauded by the New York Times as a "delightfully weird and just plain delightful show" that "will provide the kind of thrills we look for in all musical comedies," Ride the Cyclone makes its area debut at Moline's Black Box Theatre August 11 through 20, with the Times going on the praise the show's "engaging and varied score" and "supremely witty book."

For the venue's final production of its 2022 summer season, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, from August 4 through 14, will present the award-winning song-and-dance revue The World Goes 'Round that celebrates the legendary composing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, whose works include Broadway’s longest running American musical, Chicago, and Cabaret, considered by many to be the greatest movie musical of all time.

A heckuva lot of talented people put this production together; see it now, while the duck's still in the pond.

Pages