Review: Sabrina Carpenter closes Lollapalooza with confectionary joy

Our pool of genuinely funny music performers has never been large. Musicians get timid about humor, with reason. Audiences take earnest artists seriously and let time and taste catch up to anyone who takes their own importance with a grain of salt. That’s one of the reasons why Sabrina Carpenter played so exuberantly in Grant Park on Sunday night. She closed Lollapalooza with real effervescent wit, even joy. Imagine! Looking goofy on stage! We had the introspection of Tyler, The Creator; the gated-community angst of Gracie Abrams; and the sunny rebellion of Olivia Rodrigo.

But god, Sabrina Carpenter is fun.

Her stage, festooned with a huge curling “SC” traced in stage lights, not only paid homage to Chicago as the original home of “Soul Train,” she and her dancers threw in their own version of a “Soul Train” line dance. By the end of the first song, she was in a conga line. Within a few songs, she’d settled into a sort of samba twang for “Slim Pickins,” with its great chorus: “Since the good ones are deceased or taken /  I’ll just keep on moanin’ and bitchin.’”

Midway through, nodding to Chicago cool again, she brought out Earth, Wind & Fire, along with its entire horn section, for an inspired  bop through “Let’s Groove” and “September.”

I was not expecting chills in August, yet here we are.

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Carpenter — whose act fits nicely into the contemporary wave of ubiquitous young woman pop singers, though works subversively, even subtly, against the mold — loaded her set with the winks, bumps, put-downs and self-deprecations that dance across her albums. She’s such a knowing throwback to ‘70s variety shows that her stage even mimicked TV studios, bundling the stage cameras into the kind of large swiveling stands associated with the days of live TV. In another life, Carpenter could have been Carol Burnett. Or Carole Lombard. Or maybe a Looney Tunes rabbit. But definitely a character.

Sabrina Carpenter, at least on stage, her Lolla set confirmed, is a role, albeit with a heart. You could argue that of Rodrigo, Abrams, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, Charlie XCX, the wave of woman superstars that get lumped colloquially as “the pop girlies.” But among this group, the Super Friends of Pop, only Carpenter reminds you she is a confection. A former Disney Channel star (of course), her playful nods to showbiz convention and cliche feel second nature — not unlike the way, say, Martin Short feels born to the stage. When she closed with the inevitable “Espresso” — last year’s song of the summer — and its nonsensical “That morning coffee, I brewed for ya / one touch and I brand-newed it for ya,” a teenager beside me, singing, threw in the song’s quiet aside:

“Stupid.”

It’s there, in the studio version of “Expresso,” a sardonic meta-quip from Carpenter about own writing, which can get so tangled in heated knots, it’s just shy of camp in places, only to turn clever again. This might be Carpenter’s finest quality, her ability to surprise without underlining any effort. At the lip of the stage, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, she managed to be intimate despite playing to the population of a small city: “I know you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed,” then plainly added: “We had sex, I met your best friends.” Her knack for detail met noir-laced burlesque in “because i liked a boy,” which opens, “I said I wanted Thin Mints and you said you knew a guy,” only to rage, “Now I’’m a homewrecker, I’m a (expletive) / I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.”

A beat later, she’s working those Groucho Marx eyebrows, singing: “Where art thou? / Why not uponeth me?”

Carpenter is camp the way that Dolly Parton is camp, fully in charge of the tone without sacrificing brains. You take her seriously because she’s funny, and shrewdly provocative. On her previous tour, she sang a song while seated on a toilet seat, which — and this is the best part — she would wipe down before she sat.

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For Lolla, she framed the show as “SC News Chicago,” incorporating satiric commercials between songs, a parody of 1-900 chat line ads for “Bed Chem,” a commercial for “Manchild Spray” before her recent hit, “Manchild,” the song of this summer: “And how survive the Earth so long? / If I’m not there, it won’t get done / I choose to blame your mom.”  The men in her songs are basically Wile E. Coyote, and she is the Roadrunner, addicted to the chase. She’s not above declaring herself horny.

But then going broad works at Lollapalooza.

In fact, it may be the only way to perform here now — if only because Grant Park becomes so overcrowded during headliners like Carpenter that unless you’re up front somewhere near the stage, you’re watching this on screens the entire time or you’ll have to wait for a clip on TikTok or Instagram to spot anything sly or understated. Once again, Carpenter understands the assignment. She asks “It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your girlfriend is?” then moments later notes how “grateful” she is. She sends-up the corny tropes of a generation of hitmakers with a comforting bit of heart. She’s all off balance, sincere but sincerely silly. She looked out on Lollapalooza Sunday — which, by day four, is basically “Lord of the Flies” — surveyed the mess and laughed.

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