With Time Out NY describing the entertainment as “Broadway's funniest, splashiest, slap-happiest musical comedy in at least 400 years,” Quad City Music Guild opens its three-show summer season in Moline with the Prospect Park Auditorium's June 10 through 19 run 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.”

One of the millennium's biggest animated-film hits enjoys a raucous, colorful, and tuneful stage presentation when Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse presents the venue return of Madagascar: A Musical Adventure, a delightful family treat, running June 9 through July 2, reuniting audiences with Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe, Gloria the hip-hip-Hippo, and all of their other Dreamworks favorites.

Nominated for five 2011 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and based on the beloved film comedy starring Whoopi Goldberg, the tuneful and riotous Sister Act opens the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's summer season, the show's June 2 through 12 run demonstrating why the Associated Press deemed it “frothy, giggly, and yet often poignant,” as well as “a musical that hits all the right spots, achieving something close to Broadway grace.”

With its delightful assemblage of songs including “Fins,” “Volcano,” “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” and the iconic "Margaritaville," the Jimmy Buffett celebration Escape to Margaritaville opens the 2022 season at Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, this uplifting musical stage treat lauded by the Hollywood Reporter as "the theatrical equivalent of sipping on a frozen drink while lying on a beach chair in the blazing sun."

In November, I saw the original play "Jacques"alope by the Haus of Ruckus team of TJ Green and Calvin Vo at the Mockingbird on Main. It was a lively, uproarious quest story. Imagine my delight when I learned that it had gotten a baby brother!

This family favorite, smartly directed and choreographed by Shane Hall for the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, was spectacular from start to finish. In fact, you should get your tickets now, and finish reading this review later. Name recognition alone could sell this show out, and once word gets out that it’s also great, seats will no doubt be hard to come by.

Based on the beloved Natalie Babbitt novel that has sold more than five million copies and is widely considered a classic of modern children's literature, the Broadway adaptation of Tuck Everlasting makes its area debut at Moline's Spotlight Theatre June 3 through 12, this Tony Award-nominated family treat lauded by the New York Times as "a warm-spirited and piercingly touching musical."

With Broadway World describing the dark comedy as "a wicked satire that is so much more than just a tearing-down of cultural icons," author Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God enjoys a June 3 through 12 run at Moline's Playcrafters Barn Theatre, this Barn Owl Series presentation having inspired The Toronto Star to rave, "What seems to be a comedic deconstruction of the famous Peanuts cartoon characters turns out to be one of the most interesting and moving plays I've seen this year."

Haus of Ruckus fans will be delighted to learn that Green's and Vo's signature nuttiness will remain intact. There will be puns. There will be puppets. This time, however, there will be twice as many of them.

Praised by the Bangor News as “a smashing hit” and “a rib-tickler if ever I saw one,” the farcical comedy Here Lie Jeremy Troy enjoys a June 2 through 12 run at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, its playwright Jack Sharkey also the author of such recent venue hits as Missing Link, I Take This Man, and 100 Lunches: A Gourmet Comedy.

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