Both the year and the theatrical season are winding down for a long winter’s nap, and the Timber Lake Playhouse’s final production of 2024 could not offer a more pleasant nightcap. Directed and choreographed by Marquez Stewart, and featuring some surprisingly effective audience participation, Winter Wonderettes is a wonderful dose of theatre to fully get you in the spirit of the season.

If anyone can parody a parody -- along with its early roots, its subsequent wannabes, plus a bunch of random stuff -- it's Calvin Vo and T Green, founders of the theatrical troupe Haus of Ruckus, and their posse of benign troublemakers. They do so spectacularly in Dojo to Go, now running at St. Ambrose University's Studio Theatre, written by the prodigious pair and directed by Vo.

M: It’s the cast members, in character, telling you to put your cell phones away and all that, which perfectly sets the tone for all the fourth-wall-breaking in Life Sucks.

K: So much fourth-wall breaking. Does the fourth wall even exist here?

The Quad Cities’ theatre season is beginning to wind down for the year. So it follows that the holiday season must be ramping up, and the final production of Quad City Music Guild’s 76th season, Irving Berlin's White Christmas, is staged with plenty of charm by director Kevin Pieper, offering a pleasant-enough teaser of the tidings to come.