With DC Theatre Scene calling the show “a wonderfully fun production” that's “clever enough to charm all ages,” Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse opens its 2019 season of high-spirited family musicals with Junie B. Jones Is Not a Crook, an adaptation of Barbara Park's beloved children's book that the Maryland Theatre Guide described as “almost too much fun to be as heartfelt as it is.”

What’s it like being big? I guess it all depends on perspective and age. After all, adulthood is filled with all kinds of responsibilities and stress that accompany being grown; when we're young, we wish to be old, and when we’re old(er), we yearn to be young. So goes the storyline for Big: The Musical, the lighthearted comedy now playing at Moline's Spotlight Theatre. And Friday’s opening-night performance was loads of fun for everyone.

One of the most successful and adored film comedies of the 1980s will be given new musical-comedy stage life at the Spotlight Theatre April 5 through 14 when the Moline venue presents the area debut of Big: The Musical, a Tony-nominated charmer by the composing team of David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr. that DC Theatre Scene said “is filled with zany moments along with memorable musical numbers.”

Continuing the company's plan of producing all of William Shakespeare's plays by 2023, area verse-theatre troupe the Prenzie Players delivers one of the Bard's freshest and funniest titles in its April 5 through 13 QC Theatre Workshop staging of The Comedy of Errors – a work that esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom said “reveals Shakespeare's magnificence at the art of comedy” and demonstrated “mastery in action, incipient character, and stagecraft.”