They're creepy and they’re kooky, but I must tell you: For a musical comedy about a clan that generally lacks enthusiasm for anything other than the macabre, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's The Addams Family was truly a high-energy showcase of talent and spectacle. Director Courtney Ryan Crouse, who's also the company's artistic director, brought the ghoulish tale to light in a way that was hysterically heartwarming.

One of history's most adored classical operettas enchanting audiences at Davenport's St. Ambrose University on June 20 and 22 when the talents of Opera Quad Cities debut Die Fledermaus, Johann Straus II's legendary 1874 work that's sure to deliver mischief, masks, laughter, and some of the area's most astounding voices.

Described by Time Out New York as an “insanely fun mixtape musical” and by Variety as a show that “gleefully apes the worst excesses of the era's pole-dancing, crotch-grinding, big-hair-tossing movies,” the Broadway smash Rock of Ages enjoys a June 20 through July 6 run at Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, treating audiences to a celebration of 1980s chart-toppers that NY1 called “so cleverly staged and impressively performed that it's an irresistible, offbeat trip of a show that hits all the right notes.”

Courtney Crouse and Tommy Ranieri are both enthusiastic theatre directors who are taking on recent roles as artistic directors of, respectively, our area's summer-stock organizations the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre and the Timber Lake Playhouse. Their passion for the craft and their new summer homes were obvious in recent interviews about the theatres located just 24 miles apart, one on each side of the Mississippi River.