With its latest show described as “colorful, energetic, and wonderfully silly” by TheatreJones.com and praised for its “sweetness, humor, and energetic high spirits” by the New York Times, Davenport Junior Theatre treats family audiences to the company's debut of Seussical Jr., a one-act, all-student-performed version of the Tony-nominated storybook musical.

Maybe our virtual lives are just as important as our physical lives. To some, maybe, they're more important.

After receiving dozens of national and local entries for its second-annual contest, the QC Theatre Workshop will present the six winners and finalists in the company's 2018 Susan Glaspell Playwriting Festival during a special two-part event, with readings of three different scripts performed on two successive nights.

So much has been said about Pat Flaherty's performances over the years that I hesitate to add more here for fear of being accused of plagiarism. Suffice it to say Flaherty has brought a smile to my face in everything I have ever seen him act in, and his portrayal in Sleuth was certainly no exception.

Augustana College's production of In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) takes the audience back to the simpler time of the 1800s, when electricity was being discovered, doctors still worked out of their homes, and females were apparently so sexually repressed they were driving themselves insane.

Even though many fans of The Sound of Music know this legendary Rodgers and Hammerstein musical by heart, audiences will be in for a thrilling treat on February 8 when the Adler Theatre's Broadway at the Adler series hosts the show in its nationally touring presentation directed by Jack O'Brien, the three-time Tony Award winner who directed Broadway's original production of Hairspray.

Written by award-winning author Jennifer Haley, the stage cyber-thriller The Nether opens New Ground Theatre's 2018 season in a production running February 2 through 11, with Haley's acclaimed play earning this rave from the New York Times: “As a parable for where we’re headed on that big old highway in the digital sky, The Nether exerts a viselike grip while taking you down avenues of thought you probably haven’t traveled yet.”

This past Friday was freaky. Because at the opening night for the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse’s Freaky Friday musical, the many stories of the evening – director Erin Thompson’s return to the theatre where she got her start in 1993’s Annie; her show being Thompson’s first professional directing credit – included the sheer splendor of the entire performance, from the acting to the dancing to the incredible singing. My wife and I definitely left the experience saying, “That was freaky good.”

A biting period comedy about sexual desire, motherhood, jealousy, and the early days of its parenthetical object, Sarah Ruhl's Tony-nominated In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) runs at Augustana College January 26 through February 4, treating audiences to a work the New York Times called “insightful, fresh, and funny” and “as rich in thought as it is in feeling.”

The most famed work by one of the most famed authors of stage mysteries will be presented at the Black Box Theatre January 27 through February 11, with the Moline venue housing Anthony Shaffer's mind-twisting Sleuth, which received the 1971 Tony Award for Best Play and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier.

Pages