A 2016 Tony Award nominee and a tune-filled farce that the New York Daily News named one of its year's top-10 must-see musicals, the heady and hysterical Disaster! enjoys a July 20 through September 10 run at Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, this jukebox delight inspiring Time Out New York's Adam Feldman to rave, "I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud at the theatre as often as I did at Disaster!"

A Tony-nominated delight that the Chicago Reader lauded for its “tongue-in-cheek choreography and playfully smart lyrics,” the theatrical version of beloved Reese Witherspoon comedy enjoys a Timber Lake Playhouse presentation in the July 14 through 24 run of Legally Blonde: The Musical, the Mt. Carroll venue's production sure to demonstrate why Broadway World called the show “a bright testimony to the power of women and importance of self-love.”

Praised by the Chicago Tribune for its “warmhearted wit leavened with wistful regret” and “inner light of emotional honesty,” author Lauren Gunderson's astronomical drama Silent Sky enjoys a July 14 through 24 run at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, with this moving play a work that, according to the Tribune, “shines with the luminous joy of re-centering women whose achievements have been too long overlooked by the telescope of history.”

From my perspective, it’s always fascinating to hear from the director before a Genesius Guild production, and on Saturday night, Jill Sullivan-Bennin’s thoughts on Electra were certainly enlightening. Grief, it seems, is as timeless as life itself. And Sophocles’ tragedy certainly hammers the message in: Stephanie Burrough’s Electra spent nearly the entire show lamenting about the awfulness of everything in her life.