Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Second City opens new Laguna show

This past weekend, Second City opened a new show in Laguna where they skewer Orange County. The name of the customized revue is The Second City: Can You Be More Pacific. It's playing at The Laguna Playhouse until April 11, 2010.

Here's excerpts from a review.
Thanks to the fictional O.C. as well as the addictive scandaliciousness of The Real Housewives and MTV's Laguna Beach franchises, Orange County was put on the map as a breeding ground for privileged excess (oh, the drama!). While CAN YOU BE MORE PACIFIC? does touch on a few things specific to Laguna Beach life itself, they more or less point a funny, endearingly judgmental finger on the county as a whole that used to be the home of millions of orange groves before Walt came in up north, and the upwardly mobile staked their claim parts Southward. (Don't worry, the not-so-rich enclaves of Fullerton and Santa Ana are made fun of too).

The Chicago-based six-member troupe in this particular show—comprised of (in alphabetical order) Frank Caeti, Craig Cackowski, Molly Erdman, Brian Gallivan, Niki Lindgren, and Claudia Michelle Wallace—are not only amusing with wit, brashness and charm, they are also quite wonderful stage actors/singers (although, poor alto Wallace is not served consistently well by the collective troupe's song keys). This remarkable feat from comics is not too much of a bombshell considering their training ground produced some of the most well-known, well-trained stage and TV performers around. Everyone from Bill Murray, Rick Moranis and Dan Aykroyd, to Catharine O'Hara, Amy Sedaris, and Bonnie Hunt have honed their skills here, and almost every player on Saturday Night Live (including Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, arguably two of the funniest women today) got their start here.[...]

The central idea here is to let a few out-of-towners shine a light in the silly little things that make O.C. a unique place. Thanks to Marc Warzecha's direction of a script he co-wrote with Andy Cobb, and six brilliant improv hams, this "outsider's" look into life in the O.C. isn't so much a parody but a reverently humorous tribute.

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