On March 8, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra announced that Mark Russell Smith would be its new music director and conductor. And as the Minneapolis-based musician serves as artistic director of orchestral studies at the University of Minnesota, director of new-music projects for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and music director for Virginia's Richmond Symphony Orchestra, his current positions alone made him sound an appropriate, and sufficiently intimidating, choice.

Yet a day before our recent phone interview, Smith received an e-mail from the Quad City Symphony Orchestra that managed to intimidate even him - a document, he says, titled "Repertoire from 1917 through 2007," listing every piece the venerable area institution has performed publicly during those nine decades.

Wow, I say.

"I know," he says. "It's a little light reading."

THE RUINS

I caught The Ruins during a minimally populated Saturday-afternoon screening, so I pray that a larger, rowdier audience laughed like mad when our surgeon-to-be hero (the hilariously stalwart Jonathan Tucker) surmised the deadly situation he and his friends were in and barked, with absolute earnestness, "Four Americans on vacation don't just disappear!"

That poor, dumb kid. Never saw a horror movie.

If you peruse your program before the Quad City Music Guild's current production of Once Upon a Mattress, you'll see that Joe Urbaitis plays a character named Prince Dauntless the Drab. While watching the actor, it probably won't take long for you to decide that Urbaitis is colossally miscast in the role, as his inventive, fearlessly funny performance in this musical comedy is anything but drab.

During the first few minutes of Smoke on the Mountain, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's current gospel comedy, the stage is only occupied by the Reverend Mervin Oglethorpe (Vaughn M. Irving), the devout, twitchy preacher at the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church. It's the summer of 1938 in rural North Carolina, and the good Reverend has a problem: He's arranged for the Sanders Family Singers to perform for his congregation, and with the service scheduled to begin, they're nowhere to be found.