If you know this musical's title, and have seen any ad artwork, you already know that the show involves a very bad sentient plant. So I'll now reveal that it grows, as plants do. Except real big. And it's a carnivore. And it keeps wanting heftier portions of meat.

One of the most powerful and influential memoirs in American literature will, on October 3 and 4, enjoy a live rendition at the University of Dubuque's Heritage Center, with Richard Wright's iconic Black Boy given theatrical treatment in a Literature to Life solo presentation that premiered at the Kennedy Center – one that boasts actor Tarantino Smith playing more than a dozen of the book's seminal characters.

An 1882 stage classic that the New York Times, in 2018, called “suddenly as timely as a tweet,” Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People will be presented, in a modern-day re-imaging, at Davenport venue the Mockingbird of Main September 30 through October 9, its exploration of the impacts of pollution and moral complacency perhaps even more relevant now than it was in the 19th century.

I was delighted to catch Friday’s opening-night performance of the new musical comedy Disenchanted! at the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse. Directed by Corinne Johnson, with musical direction by Ron May, this show is about the other sides – more disgruntled sides – of the lives of fairytale characters made famous through the wonderful world of Walt Disney, with Snow White and her gang of dissatisfied co-princesses venting their frustrations as storybook/movie characters.