With Texas Music Times raving that "The brilliance of Adam Hood" lies "in how he can be complex with natural simplicity," the singer/songwriter headlines a May 7 engagement at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, his 2022 album Bad Days Better inspiring Turn Up the Amp to award it "an early vote for Record of the Year in whatever category you want to place it."

With her music described by A Jazz Noise as "a raw, abrasive, oppressive, and thrilling journey,” Chicago-based improviser, composer, educator, curator, and woodwind specialist Emily Rach Beisel performs at Rock Island venue Rozz-Tox on May 7, the evening also boasting a set with the Denver-based musicians of A Light Among Many, self-described as delivering "suffocating, sprawling soundscapes of drone and doom metal."

A Pulitzer Prize winner hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the finest American plays of the 20th century," Thornton Wilder's classic The Skin of Our Teeth enjoys a May 7 through 10 staging in Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center, the 1942 play also lauded by the Herald-Tribune as "wonderfully wise" and "a tremendously exciting and profound stage fable.

From May 5 through 9, a TV pop-culture phenomenon comes to thrilling stage life when Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse presents Schoolhouse Rock Live!, the beloved show – presented as part of the venue's Magic Owl Children's Theatre program – inspired by the Emmy Award-winning 1970s Saturday-morning cartoon series that taught history, grammar, math, and more through clever, tuneful songs.