Saturday In The Arts is a comprehensive weekly feature looking at a trend, personality, or major subject involving the Quad-Cities arts and entertainment scene. Many Quad City Music Guild (QCMG) board members haven’t acted on stage in more than a year, but they have been acting in the best interests of the community as they navigate the scary plot twists of a treacherous Covid landscape. Due to ongoing Covid safety protocols and continuing limitations on audience size, the QCMG board announced last month it would cancel the rescheduled April 2021 show. “The Secret Garden” was two weeks away... Read More

Mark McGinn’s love of the theater is literally in his blood. His father Jack (who died in 2000) started performing at Quad City Music Guild in Moline within two years of its founding in 1949, and was in dozens of shows. Mark, a 67-year-old Bettendorf resident, started with Guild at Prospect Park in 1972, playing clarinet for “Fiddler on the Roof,” and his first stage role was in 1976’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” (as one of the apostles). McGinn has since been involved in more than 70 other shows (including last summer as John Wilkes Booth in Black Box’s “Assassins” in Moline), mostly... Read More

There’s a moment in Richmond Hill’s “Dearly Beloved” where you get Heidi Pedersen, Valeree Pieper AND Diane Greenwood on stage sparring and spewing some southern “hospitality” and for a moment you forget you are watching three local theatre icons and instead feel as if you are accidentally witnessing a real family feud.  Ultimately, that’s the goal of theatre: “to pretend with authority,” as actor Willem Dafoe says, and in most productions – amateur and professional – that is fleeting and is not a notion played on repeat. Lucky for Richmond Hill and Director John VanDeWoestyne,... Read More