Thursday's show was performed by a cast of six: Bob Ahlgren, Dan Bakkedahl, Lisa Brooke, John Lutz, Linda Perry and Sue Salvi. The presentation, which lasted over two hours, was lively and often outrageous, as Second City performed its trademark satirical skits, mocking everything from high school principals, to overweight and elderly people, to Denny's waiters.
Second City's performance consisted of 20 short skits, only three of which were improvisational. Though each skit was thematically different, they had in common a scathing tone, mercilessly skewering whatever subject they focused on. For example, the first skit was set in Denny's and managed in six or seven minutes to mock the hopeless stupidity of the waiters and busboys as well as such cultural icons as Regis Philbin and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."
Second City's second skit, probably the audience's favorite, consisted of two senior citizens sitting on lawn chairs watching and throwing bread to the audience, who they seemed to think were pigeons. As if the premise weren't hackneyed enough, the two performers, Ahlgren and Brooke, played on innumerable cliches. Their characters were both totally senile, spouting lines such as "Pigeons are the only species other than humans that mate erotically" with smug self-confidence. The skit reached a climax when an audience member threw a piece of bread at Brooke, who screeched at him to "get out" of the pack of pigeons (the audience), until the poor boy was actually forced to exit the Frontroom. The skit ended on the punchline, "Damn squirrels."
The other highlight of Second City's performance was a skit set in a classroom, with a beleaguered teacher trying to prove a mathematical theorem to her inept, distracted students, as the nerdy principal looked on. The skit was more than just side-splittingly funny-many lines rang all too true. What student hasn't sat in a classroom watching a math teacher scribble what looks like Greek on the board, and not felt like asking, "Are are you just making all this up?"
Several of Second City's skits seemed to have no purpose other than shock value. For example, one skit showed a man trying to leave for work as his pushy wife insisted on lengthy goodbye kisses. Only by the last line was it revealed that these two were not man and wife, but mother and son, a display of incest that had the audience moaning with discomfort. Yet such skits did not come off as undeveloped; their unabashedly gratuitous meaninglessness was effectively satirical and very funny.
Of the actors who took part in the performance, the standout was the comically pathetic Ahlgren, whose presence livened each skit. My favorite was his superhero Captain Apathy ("All the powers of Superman but none of the willingness to use them!")
Over the past 40 years, Second City has often proved to be a starting ground for comedians who go on to reach considerable fame; alums of the traveling group and the television version, Second City TV, include Jerry Stiller, John Candy and Martin Short, among others.
Mr. Gad's House of Improv opened for Second City with three short improv games reliant upon audience suggestion. The first was "New Choice," in which two performers had to imagine life in an audience member's location of choice, a laundromat in Hell. While Mr. Gad's second skit, set in a prison, was uncharacteristically short on laughs, the third, called "Time Acceleration," was the unquestionable highlight of the three. Set on the scene of a Michael Jackson music video (per audience suggestion), two students had to perform the same skit in shorter and shorter amounts of time, ending with a period of one second. Their final solution was simply for "Michael Jackson" to bend over and scream, "In the back!" The Gad's skits, though understandably less polished, held up admirably in comparison to Second City's.