Just in time, The Second City is back on stage in Toronto.
That’s right. The Second City has moved east of downtown to the new Comedy Bar on the Danforth. The facility is sleek and intimate, and boasts – in current order of importance – high-end, state-of-the-art air filtration and great sightlines.
After a pandemic lifetime, it’s time to remind ourselves what uproarious communal laughter is. The two solid new Second City shows being mounted at this bright new venue will do just the trick.
The Fast and the Furiously Festive is the company’s holiday show.
The framing story, which opens and closes the show, is about a family strikeforce mission to make things right when Dad forgets the most improbable Christmas dinner menu item, but just won’t let his little girl be disappointed. The show is a little slow to start (or maybe I was a little slow to warm up, being out of practice with this whole audience member-thing) . . . but I can assure that apex-level comedy gems abound. Especially after intermission, the show tightens up (or I loosened up), and it rolls impressively from big laugh to big laugh.
If you’re seeking holiday-based comedy, the standouts include a scene with a mischievous pantomiming elf (Wilfrid Lee) and the detective who’s trying to catch him (Andy Assaf) – with audience participation that channels children’s show logic with hilarious effects. Also hilarious is the full cast as department heads assembled by Disney CEO Andy Hull to brainstorm how to rebrand Christmas, based on premises drawn from the audience. Watch for Nicole Passmore whose brash one-person “Marketing Department…” over-delivers during this segment – not to mention Lee’s wow-inducing Art Department. And when the entire cast improvise an audience member’s special holiday memory, the results are unpredictable, irreverent and hilarious.
If you like your comedy less holiday-centric, The Fast and the Furiously Festive folds in straight-up silly and topical gems, as well. The best features Assaf as low-talent children’s entertainer the BassMan who casts a, well, inexplicable spell on adults. Also outstanding is a sketch depicting the novel approach taken by an over-the-top doctor (Liz Johnston) dealing with parents who are nonsensically hesitant to vaccinate their child. And for intensity (think laughter fuelled by one too many Red Bulls), nothing matches a sketch featuring Passmore and Jillian Welsh careening wildly between cooing Scandinavian-accented affirmations of cozy safety, and breathlessly conjuring the darkest, most extreme excesses of real-world anti-coziness.
Welcome Back to the Future is the headlining mainstage show.
It feels like a celebration from the moment that the cast declare, “We’re back”. The show feels like it’s been constructed to remind us of everything we’ve been missing: from loose improvisation to tight sketches and from lowbrow to high concept.
Mainstay Chris Wilson and newer member Nkasi Ogbonnah anchor two of the best sketches. In the first long-form sketch of the night, Wilson is the temperamental computer that Ogbonnah is trying (and failing) to access. This silly yet sharp sketch is rooted in observational comedy about the ways we depend on, interact with – and get frustrated by – our computers. We have navigated so much of pandemic life on our computers that the sketch lands as both universal and (depressingly) topical. Later in the show, the two reunite as a married couple engaging in role play to spice up “sex night”. I don’t want to spoil the premise – but suffice it to say that in the sketch Ogbonnah, who is Black, takes the role play in directions that surprise the white Wilson. The result is a near-perfect fusion of hilarity and discomfort that unapologetically sticks its provocative landing.
Watching this show is like observing horses who have been penned up for months running free at last – wild and with abandon. A dizzying variety of sketches pour forth. A zany western scene – hilariously described as “Deadwood, but shitty” is interrupted by a disorienting but hilarious meta moment, that goes on to get meta . . . about its meta-ness. Andrew Bushell, whose low-key deadpan delivery sneaks up in several sketches, goes over the top as the game show host of a woman’s overactive imagination. Post-apocalyptic singsongs. Psychic twins. Hannah Spear in a spot-on, long-form animal impression. Tricia Black singing about being a gender alien. Bushell and Natalie Metcalf as dueling divorce lawyers pulling audience members into the middle of their legal battle. And students who use a hilarious time machine because they long to return to simpler, less politically correct times . . . where they learn to “be careful what you wish for”, thanks to historical figures brought to life by Ogbonnah (channelling the incisive snarl of her history-based sketch troupe 1623).
Bottom line – there is genuinely something for everyone here: the topical, the seasonal, the silly and the edgy. It may take a while to get back into the whole communal-laughing-in-public thing. And we may be doing it at 50% capacity at least for a while. But Back to the Future and The Fast and the Furiously Festive prove definitively just how much we’ve been missing. And suggest that The Second City Toronto may just have found a new gear.
They’re back – at the Comedy Bar on the Danforth – and if laughter is the strongest medicine, ‘tis the season to go get yours.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2021
