'America: All Better!' an insta-classic from Second City

December 27, 12:57 PMChicago Theatre Review ExaminerCatey Sullivan

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The cast of America: All Better! is (from left) Michael Patrick O'Brien, Anthony LeBlanc, Joe Canale, Brad Morris, Lauren Ash, Shelly Gossman and Emily Wilson.  

It’s not every show wherein a cast member wordlessly convinces an audience member to strip down to his (the audience member's) hirsute nipples and resolutely fleshy bellly. And then remain shirtless as the performance continues on its merry way. 

Yet that is precisely what happened at Second City’s America: All Better! revue recently, as a cast member playing a mute Russian gymnast silently coaxed a young man (who, BTW, 1) was not a plant and 2) seemed stone-cold sober) - to spend half an hour or so naked from the waist up for the viewing pleasure of the rest of the audience. Dear readers, these are truly wild and crazy times in America. Does any theater reflect the buoyant chaos better than Second City? We think not.

In the 20 years we’ve been attending the comedic institution that spawned Tina Fey, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Steven Colbert and too many others to count we had never before seen an audience member literally – and willingly - lose his shirt. Nor, for that matter, had we seen a balance beam routine performed atop a rail littered with cocktails, baskets of Buffalo wings, dirty napkins and other detritus of the audience members seated at said rail. Instead of triple full Arabians and Yurchenko round-offs, said gymnast (Shelly Gossman) did things like sprinkle packets of artificial sweetener on people’s heads. And swig their cocktails. And steal their clothes.

Like Barack Obama, America: All better! is truly something special. Directed by Matt Hovde and written and performed by the cast (Gossman, Joe Canale, Lauren Ash, Anthony Leblanc, Brad Morris, Michael PatricK O’Brien and Emily Wilson), All Better! deals with some tough targets. How, for instance, do you make mock of a president elect who is generally viewed as a fellow who could walk across Lake Michigan, rainbows and moonbeams shooting from his fingers, puppies and kittens cavorting in his wake , should be so choose?

As it happens, there are ways. “Let’s not get all Hakuna Matata just yet,” cautions LeBlanc in a dead-on send up of African American intellectual and gadfly Cornell West. Besides, if Obama’s aura is still saintly enough to be problematic when it comes to satire, there are plenty of other nimrods (Rod Blagojevich) to fill in the gap. And in O’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, Morris channels his inner Badass Jew and taps into a comic goldmine. On the gentile side of things, Mayor Daley is, of course, the gift that just keeps on giving. A skit on his dunder-brained wooing of the International Olympic Committee is accurate unto the point of tragic.

Equally hi-feckin’-larious is a surreal skit involving mass murderers trying to work through their issues via “movement therapy.” Never has the specter of a sea cucumber been so magnificently absurd.

And as for the polar bear who berates the energy-wasteful habits of Humvee drivers (“Do you really need to drive a tank in the city? Is your penis that small?”) and other ecological miscreants suffice to say he’s six feet of plushie merriment.

As always, Ruby Streak’s musical direction provides verve, snap and polish. American is not, of course all better. But even if it were, we suspect Second City would still find plenty to skewer. 

All photos courtesy of Second City

Bottom photo: Michael Patrick O'Brien