A well-known seasonal tale gets an inventive theatrical makeover when Iowa City's Riverside Theatre presents playwright Joe Landry's It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, which finds Frank Capra's holiday classic – and the entire town of Bedford Falls – re-enacted by a cast of five in this delightful November 29 through December 15 stage presentation.

Directed by Dana Skiles, My Son Is Crazy, but Promising boasts 15 actors, and while about half of the characters don’t especially move the plot along, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t bring their “A” game.

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?

Shakespeare is the staple of theatre and has been for centuries. Augustana College’s latest production, The Comedy of Errors, presents one of the Bard’s more oft-told tales: that of two twins with identical names who get into increasingly absurd situations. Directed with aplomb by Jeff Coussens, this is a classic story for fans of laughter.

There are at least two things that Calvin Vo and T Green – best-known for their slacker-buddy slapsticks featuring alter egos Johnny and Fungus – won't be delivering with their new Haus of Ruckus show. “It's not a Johnny-and-Fungus play,” says Green.

A hilarious and endearing tale based on the best-selling book series by Barbara Park, Junie B. Jones in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells is set to delight audiences at Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, the family comedy's November 26 through December 29 run treating family crowds to a show that led River Cities' Reader reviewer Thom White to rave, "I was legitimately laughing throughout the performance."

Delivering the charm that only a light comic opera can bring, Moline's Black Box Theatre will host a special, two-night engagement of Opera Quad Cities' La serva padrona, composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's hour-long operatic entertainment known as a model for the opera buffa genre and a quintessential piece bridging the Baroque and the Classical periods.

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.

Thanks to a wealth of talent onstage and behind the scenes, Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical is visually and aurally impressive. But Willson's material sometimes falls short of delightful.

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