Everything Is Great Again Second City
✭✭✭✭✩
by Brandon Hackett, Devon Hyland, Lindsay Mullan, Colin Munch, Paloma Nuñez & Ann Pornel, directed by Kerry Griffin
The Second City, 51 Mercer St., Toronto
March 22-July 16, 2017
"A Haven of Rationality"
This is The Second City's first revue since the major regime change that took place in our neighbour to the south. The title echoes the rallying cry of the candidate who won the electoral college vote. Articles have already been written explaining that the situation in the US is already so bizarre that satire is almost superfluous. The numerous late night show hosts need only repeat what has actually been done, said or tweeted each day to get a laugh. The question for The Second City is how a Canadian sketch comedy revue can deal with this superflux of self-satirizing material and still create a an integrated show meant to run though the summer.
The answer is that The Second City team has done so brilliantly. Its approach has been to focus on the anger and anxiety stirred up by the 45th president's upset victory rather than on the president himself. The new show thus plays many riffs on the mood of gloom that settled in since the election but views it from the point of view of the people affected. The creators have crafted a show that can change details should any examples of misgovernance more egregious than usual come to the fore, but whose framework can remain fixed as long as people's increased doubt about the future persists.
The first example of this technique is the every first song which attempts to be an optimistic Broadway-style opening chorus, except that individual chorus members are spotlit to blurt out recent absurd phrases like "alternative facts" and "fake news" in the midst of the song and dance. The first skit after this opening points out that Canadians shouldn't feel complacent about Canada's superiority. An American driver (Devon Hyland) speaks with what seems to be a Canadian border agent (Ann Pornel) about the possibility of emigrating to Canada. For every negative point about the States, the agent mentions a flaw in Canada. "But you have a fairer elections system," he claims. "Ever heard of first past the post?" she counters. The agent's advice that instead of emigrating, the American should head back to the States and try to cause change from within won a huge round of applause.
Other skits with a direct tie to the recent election include one in which a father (Colin Munch) is frustrated because he can't find the Allen key to put together a crib set from IKEA. While he wife (Pornel) works away unperturbed, the father shouts out personal anger in the form of general anger at recent political outrages. In another a young girl (Lindsay Mullan) has brought her father (Colin Munch), an autoworker from Michigan, to school for "Bring Your Parent to School Day". Since the father is wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap, the children at first innocently and then more aggressively ask the father their questions from "Why are you wearing that red cap?" to "Are you going to take away my health care?" and "Are you going to deport my grandmother?" As the questions escalate in seriousness and her father's response becomes angrier, the daughter starts vetting who can and can't ask a question and begins explaining what her father really meant to say. The skit functions both as a hilarious parody of the president's relations with his current Counsellor and his Press Secretary and as a satire of what happens when supposedly innocent kids know more about adults than you would imagine.
Perhaps the bravest sketch of the evening comes after intermission when two performers (Devon Hyland and Paloma Nuñez) begin an inane onstage song and dance about "Kitty Kops" only to be interrupted by an angry, conservative audience member (Munch). Torontonians may not know that comedy clubs in the US have been plagued with incidents of conservative audience members heckling shows that they felt were belittling the president or his party or even hurling racist epithets at the performers. Four members of the Chicago Second City's ETC revue have quit because they became fed up with abuse from the audience.
The Kitty Kops sketch addresses this directly as the conservative patron stops the performance by berating the cast and audience all under the guise of exercising his right to free speech. Then a liberal audience member (Pornel) stands up to defend her right and rebut his arguments. Meanwhile, a third audience member (Brandon Hackett), interrupts with eccentric comments that seem to come out of nowhere. When the conservative disrupter asks the essential question of the performers, "Why should I listen to you?", Nuñez responds, "Because you paid to listen to me and they did not pay to listen to you". The skit ends when Nuñez and Hyland ask the audience to tell the three arguing audience members to shut up and sit down. And the audience vociferously obliges.
While what the conservative and liberal argue about relates to the positions of Republicans and Democrats in the recent elections, the overriding emphasis is on the importance of audience decorum. Decorum of all kinds may have devolved in the US, but there still have to be places where it is upheld and performances in theatre are merely one example where a social contract exists between the audience and the performers for the performers' work to be carried out. Since the sketch occurs at the start of the second act, it can't prevent disruptions that may occur in the first. But it provides an amusing if also chilling reminder of how a vociferous few of any or no political stripe can hijack a public gathering for their own purposes.
In the first act the cast actively solicits audience input for two sketches in the tried and true manner of improv. In one a host (Nuñez) introduces a new singer (Hyland) to discuss his new album. The subject of what is his supposedly best known song comes straight from the audience. Nuñez provides her own wacky note when she makes up the song's most moving line. Hyland is amazingly adept at giving explanations of both out-of-the-blue suggestions and his performance of the full song at the end is a major treat.
In another sketch an audience member is invited on stage to be the pilot of an airplane where some of the cast are crew and some passengers. The cast's phenomenal skill at synchronous mime is given prominence when they all move according to the pilot's least turnings of the control wheel.
Director Kerry Griffin has interleaved the more overtly political sketches with sketches about the anxieties of everyday life. What emerges from this mixture is that everyday life is already nerve-wracking enough without political discord to make it worse. A man (Brandon Hackett) takes his friends to a club to celebrate his 30th birthday, but the effect is only to remind everyone of how old they are. An aunt (Nuñez) visits her pregnant niece (Pornel) and husband (Munch) but instead of comforting the couple can't stop herself from spewing out the horrors of what childbirth and child-rearing are really like.
Back-to-back skits make fun of the new age of dating on Tinder and Grindr. In the Tinder sketch (with Mullan and Pornel), the worst routine of the night, Mullan freaks out in increasingly bizarre ways at what she sees on her smartphone screen. In the Grindr sketch (with Hackett and Munch), two gay guys have to negotiate face-to-face what exactly it was that they expected to happen when they met up. Unlike the unknown difficulties Mullan is experiencing on Tinder, the Grindr scene is a subtle examination of expectations and anxieties surrounding online hook-ups. It also features the first non-comic same-sex kiss I've seen in a Second City show, a sign that the troupe is keen to move with the times.
Another timely sketch takes on the fraught discussions of racial identity and assimilation. Three people – Hackett of West Indian heritage, Nuñez of Jewish and Latino heritage and Pornel of Filipino heritage – are relaxing at a spa and have drunk a special herbal tea in order to purge their inhibitions. As the drink takes effect, all three discover to their dismay that they know virtually nothing about their perceived ethnic backgrounds.
The greatest sketch of the evening is one that, for a change, is wordless, serious and moving. Two old women (Nuñez and Pornel) meet in a nursing home and recognize each other as old friends. To Lee Cohen's gentle music, we see their lives in flashback from childhood to adolescence to maturity. Besides being so beautifully acted by the performers, the sketch plays a key role in the overall scheme of the show. Its quiet, reflective nature contrasts with all the noise of all the other scenes and its focus on friendship and on and how rapidly life passes by provides a look at what is most essential to a person. From this point of view all personal and political strife is unimportant and meaningless.
It's thrilling for Second City to include such a poignant, serious sketch, one that places all the other scenes in context and gives the show uncommon depth. Everything Is Great Again is punchy, superbly acted and precisely directed without a single let-up in energy or momentum. In response to the overwhelming feeling of impending doom that so many people are experiencing right now, The Second City has come up with one of its best-ever shows. In the midst of the threat of chaos, the show provides, at least for 90 minutes, a haven of rationality where we can laugh at the world's follies.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Lindsay Mullan, Colin Munch, Paloma Nuñez, Ann Pornel, Devon Hyland and Brandon Hackett; Colin Munch, Paloma Nuñez, Ann Pornel, Devon Hyland, Lindsay Mullan and Brandon Hacket; Brandon hackett and Colin Munch. ©2017 Paul Aihoshi.
For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com/shows/toronto/everything-is-great-again.
Everything Is Great Again
Source: http://www.stage-door.com/Theatre/2017/Entries/2017/3/26_Everything_Is_Great_Again.html
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