Diana Nollen

It’s easy to find day trips around Eastern Iowa with festivals all summer long. Here’s a guide to explosions of art in parks and streets, cultural and heritage festivals — and lots and lots of fireworks.

Steve Martin and Martin Short are heading to the Des Moines Civic Center on May 14 with their show “You Won’t Believe What They Look Like Today!” Now in their 70s, they look mahvelous.

The “Field of Dreams” prequel TV series will be filmed this summer in Central Iowa. The seven-part series will be streamed some time in 2023 on Peacock

There’s a music festival or summer concert for nearly every type of music in Eastern Iowa this summer. Check out the list of 2002 Iowa music festivals planned so far.

Try your hand at puppetry as Eulenspiegel troupe in West Liberty organizes a community storytelling project. The show will need seven to 12 people, from upper elementary to adults, to act as puppeteers or operate sound effects at each host town or site.

Surprises await throughout Theatre Cedar Rapids’ fresh take on classic tale

Old World charm, tulips ready to bloom for 2022 Pella Tulip Time Festival, slated for May 5-7.

Electropop opera “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” takes whirlwind rise through slice of “War and Peace” at Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre.

With “Sound of Music,” Director Brian Glick and company at Theatre Cedar Rapids are bringing to the surface the undercurrents swirling beneath the epic love story that dawns as Nazi power rises in Austria.

Riverside Theatre presents the first musical in it’s new space, “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” moving throughout the audience and throughout the space from April 22 to May 8.

Orchestra Iowa weaves social commentary from different centuries in “Voices of Change,” presenting Joel Thompson’s “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in concert Saturday at the Paramount in Cedar Rapids and Sunday at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City.

UI Stanley Museum of Art to house Pollock on 2nd floor, new mural in lobby

Wandering through Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa, is a religious experience. It’s often referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

The public will being seeing seedlings as post-derecho plans take root at the historic Cedar Rapids Brucemore estate.

The name “Stephen Norman” may not ring a bell around Eastern Iowa, but plenty have known and loved him by his radio name, Ric Swann. Swann, for years part of Cedar Rapids' KZIA radio’s Schulte & Swann morning team, died of cancer early Wednesday in Ohio. He was 62.