It’s a typical afternoon in April — midweek in Chicago’s infamous false-spring. On stage at Second City, just after lunchtime, six actors are rehearsing a sketch for a yet-to-be-named mainstage show that’s six weeks away from opening night.
Being in the room for a Second City rehearsal is a stark contrast to traditional theater. Usually, those rehearsals include a lot of dead air with actors standing around doing nothing as crew members problem solve lighting, sound and technical issues.
But here, the rehearsal is exciting — at times too exciting. When director Carisa Barreca pauses a scene to give notes, the performers immediately start riffing. Ideas and jokes are flying in every direction. At one point, cast member Zoe McKee breaks out into song. It’s beautiful, but Barreca eventually reigns them in.
“She’s doing that ‘it’s not going to work’ face,” McKee says, referencing the director.
How do you problem-solve funny? How does Second City, a company known for being the training ground for sketch comedy legends — like Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert — create skits that work?
It all starts in the rehearsal room.
The cast has been spending a ton of time together — rehearsing for four hours per day before performing a live show at night.
“What people don’t know about the process is that when the old cast is done, on their final day, usually a Sunday, the new cast comes in on a Tuesday,” Barreca says. “That night, the new cast has to put up a show — the old show.”
The last mainstage show at Second City was “This Too Shall Slap.” When Barreca’s cast came in on day one, they performed that show in front of a live audience. For about the next four weeks, they continued to perform the old show at night while rehearsing sketches for the new show during the day. It’s a grueling process, but, according to Barreca, it’s Second City’s special sauce.
The new cast, at Barreca’s direction, slowly starts rolling out new sketches and blending them into the old show without the audience realizing it is happening.
“Every day, I will pull a piece and add something new that we worked on, “ said Barreca. “And they’ll improvise it, and they’ll create, and then — the most important part, which I don’t know if people understand — the audience reaction to those new pieces dictates what goes in a show.”
And sometimes, the sketches that kill in rehearsal don’t make the final cut.
One sketch that the cast worked on for hours centered around the Tamale Guy — a well-known Chicago staple that sells his savory snacks to drunken Chicagoans outside of bars.
Once it was on the main stage, it just didn’t work.
“We put it up for two nights, and it didn’t work in this show, so we pulled it,” said Barreca. “The graveyard of funny bits is vast.”
This trial-and-error style of show building makes Barreca a comedy traffic cop. She gets the final say on what will, and won’t, be in the final production.
Many of the show’s performers take her rejection as a badge of honor.
“I love it,” performer Eddie Mujica says of a potential sketch bombing. “I love it as much as I love bringing something in that goes well. I love trying something that just absolutely fails immediately, because maybe we’re masochists, like, we’re messed up in that way,” he said with a laugh.
Part of embracing failure is about bonding and building trust between cast members.
And they need that trust when performance time comes.
The show that they created — called “Pandemonium, Please Hold” — is sketch comedy informed by improv, meaning they take audience suggestions from the real world to keep sketches fresh and different each night. It keeps a cast on its toes.
Even as the performers are spending so many hours a day together, they still need to keep up with current events in order to respond in real time to their audience.
“It’s just part of the job to be on the stage,” Barreca says. “You have to be aware of what’s going on in the world around you, because our job is to reflect that back to the audience.”
“Pandemonium, Please Hold,” is a play on the world we currently live in — which sometimes can feel like a chaos factory — and our human need to take a pause and laugh at the absurdity we are living through.
“When you say pandemonium, it can easily go immediately into chaos,” Barreca says. “With everything that’s happening in the world, it feels like pandemonium, and it gets dark. And then the audience is like, ‘but I’m living in that darkness already. I don’t want to come and see darkness’.”
And that’s where the “Please Hold” part comes into play. Barreca says this show encourages the audience to breathe and take care of each other.
On opening night, her cast provided a thrill ride with jokes covering everything from Erika Kirk, Governor JB Pritzker, and artificial intelligence, to delivery robots, lesbian kite flyers, and the droll of corporate America.
After that night’s standing ovation, Barreca reflected on her journey. For her, this marks the end of the road. The director is only with the show for the process of getting from casting to opening night. The production now belongs to the cast.
“It’s been such an amazing experience,” she says. “And now that I have to be like, ‘all right, go fly little bird,’ there is a little bit of me that will miss seeing them every day. It’s the post show blues, for sure. But I’m just so proud of this cast.”