It’s a game you play when you go to The Second City: Who’s the next breakout star? Who do they remind you of? The theater embraces the game with references such as “Every Night Live.” In the 112th Mainstage Revue that opened Thursday night at North & Wells, the answer to those questions are A) Laurel Krabacher and B) Kate McKinnon with a maniacal dash of Dave Foley.
Krabacher clearly knows it, too, which can be a fatal flaw, but isn’t here. A friend of mine once walked offstage at an L.A. sketch show when Molly Shannon, alerted to the presence of SNL scouts, took over the scene they were in and made her ultimately successful grab for stardom.
I believe Krabacher will get there, too, but without walking over her castmates. About them: They are, to a person, incredible talents in their own right. In Hannah Ingle, they have their Catherine O’Hara. In Adonis Holmes, their Keegan-Michael Key. In Jordan Stafford, their Damon Wayans. There’s no easy analog for Adisa “Di” Williams, who describes herself in the program notes as “your simple Jamaican, queer, autistic, eldest daughter next door,” but she is quick witted, charismatic and her character work is spot-on. And then there’s the lone cis white guy, Andy Bolduc. He’s outed as such in a clever intro scene in which the cast is shown in various groupings, including people “who like dick” (five of the cast members) “and this guy” (Bolduc). “This guy” is pure anarchy and comedic insanity in an unassuming dude package. There’s some Samurai Belushi lurking in there.
They are all so smart, so joyous in their approach and so committed to each other as performers that they deliver two hours of exhilarating comedy full of deep, satisfying laughter with seeming ease.
About that comedy. This revue mines two rich main veins: It’s full of anarchic musical numbers, several of them pegged to audience suggestions, and it eschews simple, relatable scene premises in favor of absurdist romps that throw two or more over-the-top characters into the ring and watch them get entangled in deeply satisfying, though sometimes utterly confusing, ways.
The show’s not perfect–there’s one dud of a sketch that’ll probably improve over the run, and there are a couple of obvious sociopolitical jokes that don’t fit the overall vibe–but 99% of it is pure heavy-metal comedy joy. Quite literally, in the case of one Krabacher sketch in which she portrays a rocker whose refrain is that “capitalism will fuck you in the mouth.”
Yes, the show is raw. To me, that was a feature, not a bug, and the crowd rode the wave well on opening night. We’ll see how the bus tour folks feel about it. But fuck them, right? This is pure comedic exploration, nothing sacrosanct, not even when it comes to taking a pointed shot at The Second City’s private equity owners, ZMC, in a Williams-led sketch leading to a revelation that we have a lot more in common with Muppets than we might expect. The corporate reference is an inside joke that will fly over most heads, but the cast went there simply because they felt the need. See the hand, bite the hand, motherbleepers.
Not that the show will be alien to longtime sketch comedy fans. Taking a concept popularized on SNL by Franken and Davis way back in 1978 and done to death ever since, one sketch shows dueling campaign ads from a sitting congresswoman and her challenger. But then the absurdist payoff comes in the form of Krabacher’s sinister billionaire in a ridiculous mustache buying off the candidates and even the public interest group formed to oppose his dark-money influence. An even funnier slant rhyme off that character comes during a Chicago Public Library sketch in the form of a horny old man using his half hour of computer time for perverted exploration. It seems Krabacher may be a student of Tim Conway as well.
Ingle channels O’Hara brilliantly in an Anna Wintour sendup that involves anointing a supermodel from the audience (all of the civilians tapped in on Thursday were great), and in a stunningly bizarre, utterly hilarious sketch that at first seems to be a sendup of real estate reality shows and the meaningless marketing adjectives used to describe various home features (“exposed brick — it’s like brick, but exposed”) before it goes completely off the rails in what turns out to be a callback to an insane earlier sketch in which the moon is revealed to be a psychotic Betty Boop manqué (also Ingle) willing to kill anyone who dares spurn her affections.
I can’t describe much more of the show for fear of undermining your experience of it, but there are brilliant turns by Stafford, Holmes and Bolduc throughout as well. You will never hear the phrase “my lord” without smiling after the latter’s Python-esque turn as a royal servant, nor will you think of the term “horse whisperer” the same way again. Stafford, meanwhile, has incredible comedic and singing chops backed by enough energy to be the blazing sun to Ingle’s off-kilter moon.
This is a feast, folks. See this crackling cast on a local stage while you can.
The Devil is in the Detours is in an open run at The Second City Mainstage.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Timothy M. Schmidt
