Based on the Oscar-winning modern classic that stands as one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time, Disney's Frozen enjoys a Quad City Music Guild presentation at Moline's Prospect Park Auditorium November 13 through 22, this magical family enchantment a three-time Tony Award nominee hailed by The Guardian for its "theatrical razzmatazz" and "sense of a real, beating heart in the relationship between the two tortured sisters."

A masterpiece of brooding intensity and dark laughs that introduced the world to the adage "Hell is other people," Nobel Prize winner Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit closes the 2026 season at Moline's Playcrafters Barn Theatre, its November 13 through 22 run treating audiences to a work the Oxford Culture Review deemed "complex and dark ... convincing and enticing."

Hailed by the New York Times as a family musical "that knows exactly what it's doing" and "works perfectly," the Tony-nominated A Year with Frog & Toad enjoys a November 13 through 14 run at the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts, this stage charmer performed by the student talents of Footliter Imagination Studio's Youth Theatre.

In April, I saw the charming A Year With Frog & Toad, and was thrilled to see that fully half of that show's cast was involved in St. Ambrose's current production. The actors I already knew are still delightful, as are the three performers I hadn’t seen before.

Winner of four 1968 Tony Awards, including Best Play, and hailed by the New York Daily News as "a stimulating, funny, imaginative comedy," Tony and Oscar winner Tom Stoppard's Hamlet "companion" Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead opens the 2026-27 mainstage season at Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center, the New York Times adding that this long-lauded work is "very funny, very brilliant, very chilling."

From November 12 through 15, magic, mystery, and adventure will take center stage at the University of Dubuque's Heritage Center, when William Shakespeare's The Tempest enjoys a student-acted production freshly adapted by Sunil Malapati, PhD, professor of chemistry at Clarke University.

With their beloved musical adaptation a perennial Madison Square Garden event from the show's 1994 debut through 2003, Tony Award winners Lynn Ahrens' and Alan Menken's A Christmas Carol will put the "hum" in "Humbug!" from November 11 through December 29, this delightful holiday fable the first production in the 50th-anniversary season at Rock Island's venerated Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse.

Hailed by the Chicago Sun-Times as "astonishing" and "a pitch black comedy about the current state of American politics," Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts' The Minutes enjoys its area debut with a November 6 through 14 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, the Chicago Tribune adding that this "explosive" work "deftly captures the tension of patriotic grandiosity and provincial defensiveness found in city halls across the land."

Lauded by the George Street Playhouse as a work in which the author's "wit, warmth, and clever storytelling are on full display," playwright Joe DiPietro's comedy An Old-Fashioned Family Murder wraps up the 2026 season at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, its November 12 through 22 run treating audiences to what Broadway World called “an uproarious new farce" in which "DiPietro pours every possible Film Noir detective cliché into a mixing bowl. The result is delicious."

With the British Theatre Guide praising the play for delivering “plenty of moments that are funny, frightening, or exciting,” playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's take on Henry James' classic chiller The Turn of the Screw enjoys an October 23 through November 8 run at Iowa City's Riverside Theatre, the Los Angeles Times hailing the work as “an ingenious twist on an old-school ghost story."

Pages