An area jazz great and instructor at the University of Iowa will be the gifted headliner in the latest Polyrhythms Third Sunday Jazz Series concert at Davenport's Redstone Room – a March 18 evening with the Steve Grismore Trio featuring vocalist Grismore on guitar, Danny Oline on bass, Fabio Augustinis on drums, and standards and originals played in the styles of Keith Jarrett, Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, and George Benson.

Although best known for his fast-paced verbal slapsticks, Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Neil Simon has also exposed a more serious side in such works as Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound, and Lost in Yonkers, and Simon's knack for both comedy and drama will be on display in Playcrafters' March 9 through 18 staging of Proposals, a work the Houston Press called “gentle and warm, like a late August breeze ruffling the leaves.”

Hosted by Davenport's River Action and named in honor of Henry W. Farnam, the chief builder of the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, the Quad Cities' Farnam Dinners are annual tributes to historically signifcant citizens and events, and this year's celebration – taking place at Jumer's Casino & Hotel on March 9 – will salute Illinois' 200th year of statehood, as well as the 200th anniversary of Kaskaskia being named Illinois' very first capital.

A dark comedy of desire, gamesmanship, and shifting power dynamics hits the QC Theatre Workshop when the Davenport venue presents the area debut of the Brodway hit Venus in Fur, a 2011 Tony Award winner that the New York Times called “a seriously smart and very funny stage seminar on the destabilizing nature of sexual desire,” and that Time Out New York lauded as “deliciously twisty and witty fun.”