International: How the Second City is producing the future stars of improv

Unusually for a nation that embraces innovation, improvisation seems to have always been something of a foreign import in the UK. The ideas of Russian Stanislavski and Frenchman Copeau have slowly permeated our acting schools, but it took the Lecoq and Gaulier schools and the TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway? to push improv into a more general awareness.

Though developed in Britain by BBC Radio and Channel 4, Whose Line Is It Anyway? took much of its inspiration from North America, based on theatre sports developed by British director Keith Johnstone in Calgary during the 1970s, as well as the improv comedy of the Second City in Toronto and Chicago, which provided two major faces for the series, Canadians Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles.

While the Second City started out in 1959 as a comedy improvisation troupe, in the last couple of decades it has grown into a network of teaching schools and programmes offering courses and performance opportunities across the range.

As chief executive Andrew Alexander says: “Improv works for any acting programme. It’s hard to teach someone to be funny but what we can do is strengthen somebody’s skills. A lot of directors like to have their actors improvise to find a deeper point of view of the character. There’s a lot an actor can learn from our kind of work.”

The difference from the mainstream theatre models is in the emphasis on group interaction. “It’s all about the ensemble,” says Alexander. “It’s laying the foundation of how to make your partner look good. You’re there to support the scene and to move the scene forward, so you find a character and find behaviour with a character and develop an arc.”

More than 33,000 students enrol at the Second City’s schools each year. They can graduate from conservatory programmes to performing in one of the 12 national touring companies for a couple of years before having the chance to appear on one of the mainstage theatres in Toronto or Chicago.

Alexander sees much of the Second City’s ability to stay relevant in the way courses, performance and audience interact across the board. “We construct our shows by using the audience like a focus group. With our shows, you’re creating material all the time while you’re doing eight performances a week for two or three years on one of our stages. So you get good.”

The Second City started in Chicago and expanded to Toronto and Los Angeles. In 1973, founder Bernie Sahlins opened the Toronto operation, but it closed after three months. Alexander then found himself stepping in.

“I’m Canadian (born in the UK) but happened to be working in Chicago at the time and was a fan of Second City,” he says. “The interesting about Toronto and Chicago is that they are both good theatre towns and they both have a good sense of community about them. So I hung around the bar watching the shows when Bernie told me his plight. I said: ‘Well, give me the rights and I’ll take a crack at it.’ And that’s how we resurrected it. My first cast in 1974 included Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Candy and Eugene Levy.

“Improv is an important part of it but we offer a lot more now – our multiple curriculum now includes writing and the Harold Ramis Film School. So you can get a fully rounded experience of all the things that go into becoming an actor.”

Continues…

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5 things you need to know about the Second City

1. It was founded in a former launderette in Chicago by Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk and Paul Sills in 1959. Permanent bases were later established in Toronto and Hollywood. Sahlins sold the company to Andrew Alexander and Len Stuart in 1987.

2. Alexander used the success of the Toronto stage shows to expand into TV with influential sketch series SCTV, which ran between 1976 and 1984. Alumni such as John Belushi and Bill Murray also became regulars on US sketch series Saturday Night Live.

3. The teaching arm is the Second City Training Center, founded in the 1980s. Its programme culminates with a show written and performed by the graduating class, who then become eligible to audition and perform with the Training Center house teams.

4. Over the past 10 years, business solutions division Second City Works has worked on more than 1,000 training assignments for blue-chip clients such as Nike, Hertz, Mastercard and Starbucks. Its diversity and inclusion division’s outreach programme offers workshops on multicultural, gender, race and LGBT themes.

5. For its April Fool’s Day launch of a fake new feature for its platform in 2013, Google partnered with Second City Works to create the “Levity Algorithm” – a new tool for business on Google Enterprise supposedly designed to “infuse humour into the workplace”.

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A Second City stalwart who helped to spread the improv gospel worldwide with the runaway success of Whose Line is actor Mochrie. He sees improv as being consistently adaptable to acting and beyond.

“It’s because the rules are fairly simple – it goes against everything you do in real life,” he says. “The basic rule is that you listen to people and you accept their ideas, they build on it and that’s it. I think improv did have its heart in theatre in the beginning when, for example, Stanislavski introduced improv exercises to help actors find their characters. It was the success of Whose Line that pushed it into the comedy spotlight.”

Although improv as we know it burst out of North America, Mochrie doesn’t see it as being bound to the region. “It’s all over the world now and people can actually make a living just going from country to country doing improv with the festivals all around.”

He says the Second City is much like a “mafia” where the alumni – including his wife, actor and director Debra McGrath – keep up enviably strong connections. “I go back often to see their shows and to do improv sets with the casts. I’m also doing a show, The Second City’s Guide to the Symphony, that we started with Toronto Symphony Orchestra and that we’re taking to Washington at the Kennedy Center with the Washington Symphony.”

Mochrie is also touring with Canadian hypnotist Asad Mecci in new show Hyprov – a live show that pairs improv with hypnotism. It’s one more example of how that Second City connection works, as Mecci explains: “The success of my solo show Hypnohype got me interested in getting better at my craft, and a friend suggested I should study at the Second City’s improv Training Center in Toronto.”

It was a timely tip, and the immersion in Second City’s trademark programme proved to be a game-changer for Mecci. “Essentially what Second City does at the beginning is to overload you with a lot of games and warm-up exercises in order to overload you, so your unconscious mind starts talking uncritically when you improvise.

“As a hypnotist I could see what they were doing and I started asking myself whether hypnosis could be used to harness this process. Could we move the conscious mind aside and then pull information out of the unconscious part, and have people who have no experience doing improv suddenly become credible improvisers? And that’s how Hyprov was born.”

Mecci cold-called Mochrie through his website, and Mochrie’s manager Jeff Andrews got the two performers together. “We workshopped the show relentlessly for months,” says Mecci. “We rented Second City Toronto’s John Candy Box Theatre to experiment during the day, and then we did performances after the mainstage show at night, starting in November last year.

“At the end of the Second City show, the theatre would announce that we would be immediately following with a new show featuring me and Colin. People were intrigued and stuck around, and the place ended up jam-packed every night. For a show at that sort of experimental point, we were kind of spoiled.”

Andrews made it a Second City hat-trick when he brought in Linda Kash as director. With a Second City background, she is also an actor who has worked at Toronto’s Canadian Stage as well as directing at Second City and running the Peterborough Academy of Performing Arts near Toronto.

Hyprov’s idea of science meets art proved the perfect challenge for a Second City director like Kash. “There were two shows colliding – a meticulous performer used to working to a fixed format and the freedom of Colin’s improv. My objective was to create a unified show out of the two parts and to allow Colin – and (The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence nominee) Mike McShane, who has also appeared in the show – to have a good time and to be challenged as well. The show had to be not reactive but active.

“There’s a common phrase in improv where you say ‘yes, and’ to your scene partner. ‘Yes, anding’ means: ‘Yes, I’m accepting your offer and I’m going to give you an offer and we’re going to progress forward that way.’ It reverses ‘no, but’ – and that’s the best deal for collaboration.”

Of her contemporaries who studied at the Second City, Kash says that 99% are still in the business. “Whether they become actors, writers, go into advertising or do cartoon voices, people find that the foundation at the Second City allows you to have a lasting career in the business. When you fail onstage in front of a paying audience over and over again through improv, you know you have a certain courage.”

Mochrie agrees wholeheartedly: “I always try to get involved in things that make me uncomfortable. I’ve been in improv for more than 32 years and there’s always the danger that you get comfortable, so I always try to challenge myself, whether it’s working with people I don’t know or doing different kinds of structures.

“Like hypnotism, a lot of people think that improv isn’t real, that somehow we’ve already come up with a hundred different scenarios for anything they may throw at us. But improv really is an art form of the moment.”

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Profile: the Second City

CEO/executive producer: Andrew Alexander
Artistic directors (training centres): Kevin Frank, Joshua Funk, Matt Hovde
Founded: 1959, Chicago
Venues: Chicago Chicago Mainstage (290 seats), Etc Theater (180), Up Comedy Club (285), Donny’s Skybox Theatre (90), De Maat Studio Theatre (90). Toronto Toronto Mainstage Theatre (320), John Candy Box Theatre (60). Hollywood Studio Theater (60)
Schools: Training Centers – 3; Training Center house teams (performance) – 5
Touring companies: 12, plus a standing engagement on Norwegian Cruise Line ships
Annual revenue (2015): $60 million

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For further details: secondcity.com, hyprov.com, papaonking.com