0
When the Second City celebrated its 50th birthday this week, the star-power on hand for the party was breathtaking: Martin Short, Steve Carell, Fred Willard, Bonnie Hunt, Harold Ramis, Jim Belushi . . .
This virtual who’s who of North American comedy underscored the outsized influence exerted by the little cabaret theatre on Chicago’s North Side. Between it and its offshoot in Toronto, the Second City has been responsible for populating many of the Saturday Night Live casts, the 1970s cult TV hit SCTV, and all manner of films, from Animal House to The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Yet for all the names that list Second City on their resumes, it is, at core, a theatre, a living space where audiences pay $20 or $25 to see tightly crafted sketch comedy revues developed through improvisation. And if they happen to spot the next John Belushi or Tina Fey on stage, so much the better.
The current revue, The Taming of the Flu, runs every night but Monday, with two shows on Friday and Saturday. A second company, the Second City Etc, mounts a separate show on a different stage from Thursday to Sunday.
Although the theatre is firmly established on the tourist agenda, the tour buses and concierges haven’t taken over: audiences are still about 50% local, according to Andrew Alexander, the chief executive and owner. “The growth of the Second City has reflected the growth of Chicago and how much more cosmopolitan it has become,” he said. “As the world has become smaller, our comedy has become more global.”
Born as an offshoot of the Compass Players (which gave the world the Mike Nichols and Elaine May comedy team), and named after a derisive dismissal of Chicago in the New Yorker, the Second City connected with audiences immediately because it gave a platform to political and intellectual humour in a country coasting on post-war prosperity.
It was a theatre in a coffeehouse then, where the likes of the actor, director and musician Alan Arkin took the stage to do arch satires of mainstream conformity, and where Sheldon Patinkin – the man who would be director through much of the 1960s – started out managing the bar.
Now, of course, it’s a juggernaut, a “comedy empire”, in the words of the New York Times. The theatre not only presents shows, it’ll do corporate engagements, it trains actors through classes in Chicago, Toronto and Hollywood, and it helps its performers stage specialised shows of their own. And it will, with shocking regularity, let loose another superstar or two.