Second City

A storefront, a hat and a borrowed title

The Second City opened on 16 December 1959 in a converted laundry at 1842 North Wells Street, started by Paul Sills, Bernard Sahlins and Howard Alk. It was not an invention from nothing: Sills had been running the Compass Players with David Shepherd from 1955, applying the theatre games of Sills's mother, Viola Spolin, to a cabaret format. The name was lifted, with a shrug, from a series of A.J. Liebling pieces about Chicago published in the New Yorker in 1952 — a put-down the company took as a trading name.

The model that emerged in those first seasons is the one still in use: a written revue of short scenes, assembled from improvised material generated in rehearsal and in front of paying audiences, then set, with a genuinely improvised stretch left in each night. The theatre moved along the street to 1616 North Wells in 1967, opened a Toronto house in 1972, and in 1976 put its Toronto company on television as SCTV, which did more than anything else to turn a local revue theatre into a recognised supply line for North American comedy.

The work is the numbering

There is no back catalogue in the usual sense — no records, no specials that define the thing. What The Second City has instead is a count. The Chicago Mainstage is on its 114th revue. The Toronto Mainstage opened its 91st in March 2026. The e.t.c. stage, the company's second Chicago room, reached its 50th revue this year. Each one is a fresh two-act show with a new six-strong ensemble and a new title, built over months and then run for the better part of a year.

The alumni list is the other body of work, and it is the reason a regional presenter can sell the brand without selling a name. John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Joan Rivers, Harold Ramis, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert and Jason Sudeikis all passed through. The commercial engine underneath is less glamorous and probably more important: a Training Center established in the mid-1980s that now teaches more than 5,000 students in Chicago, plus a film school launched in 2016 as the Harold Ramis Film School and since renamed The Second City Film School.

Who owns it, and what that changed

Andrew Alexander bought the Toronto operation in 1974 and the Chicago theatre in 1985, and ran both for decades. He resigned in 2020 after performers and former staff went public with allegations of racism at the company. In February 2021 the business was sold to ZMC, a Manhattan private-equity firm, which ended more than sixty years of owner-operator control.

The most visible result of that change was geographic. The Second City New York opened to the public in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on 16 November 2023 — the first new flagship room in half a century, and the first serious attempt to repeat the Chicago model in a city that already had its own improv ecosystem. The Chicago houses remain the centre of gravity, both at 230 West North Avenue in Piper's Alley.

2026: the e.t.c. stage stops writing things down

The year's genuine departure happened on the smaller stage. For its 50th revue, announced in January 2026, the e.t.c. company dropped the standard scripted revue and went to something close to all-improv. What eventually opened, under the title Reality Detox: The Improv Experience, is a hybrid rather than a purge — written scenes survive, but the spine of the evening is material harvested from the audience at the top of the show.

Anne Libera directs, with music direction by John Love and set design by Shayna Patel. The staging makes the gamble legible: a chalkboard on stage lists the night's running order, with improv slots that rotate from performance to performance, so the audience can see which parts of the evening nobody has rehearsed. The ensemble is Kennedy Baldwin, Anna Portnick, Chas Lilly, Max Thomas, Annie Sullivan and Riley Woolen.

Reviewing it in July 2026, Rachel Weinberg singled out the trust visible in a second-act long-form scene and Portnick's physical work, noted that the show largely sidesteps topical politics in favour of material with a longer shelf life, and said she would happily see the company push all the way to a fully improvised revue. That is a notable verdict for a theatre whose scripted revues are its product.

Pandemonium, Please Hold, and a press that split

The Chicago Mainstage's 114th revue, Pandemonium, Please Hold, opened on 8 May 2026 under director Carisa Barreca, played by Bill Letz, Eddie Mujica, Preston Parker, Yazmin Ramos, Zoe McKee and Cat McDonnell. It leans hard on live music — roughly thirty pieces including short blackouts, many of them built around songs — and the first act is generally reckoned the stronger half.

The notices did not agree. Third Coast Review called it consistently strong and balanced between high-energy bits and quieter ones, praising McDonnell's piano number about LinkedIn and McKee's singing, flagging a bathroom-attendant scene for its physical comedy and Letz's children's-television character Mr Marshmallow for its nerve; the one real complaint was a rushed AI-themed improv piece opening act two, and a sense that the revue did not quite match its predecessor, This Too Shall Slap. Writing in the Daily Northwestern on 10 May, Gabe Hawkins was harder on it, arguing that a capable cast was playing safe: he rated McDonnell's musical solo about a girl dreaming of office work as worth the ticket on its own, and McKee's retired Division III football coach reciting song lyrics as a close second, but dismissed two political sketches as predictable and loud rather than sharp.

Toronto's 91st Mainstage revue, which opened on 25 March 2026 with Chelsea Larkin, Gavin Pounds, Tim Blair, Monica Garrido Huerta, Gillian Bartolucci and Lance Oribello standing in for Antony Hall, drew a similar note from Lori Ossip: tight ensemble work, a standout improvised corporate sales presentation, and almost nothing time-specific or political in the written material. The traditional third-act improv set did not happen on opening night.

The touring half

Most of the dates on sale under the name are not in Chicago at all. The Second City Touring Company works regional theatres and performing-arts centres with Best of The Second City, a compilation show: proven sketches and songs from the archive, reworked for current audiences, newer material, and an improvised stretch driven by audience suggestions.

The forward diary runs well into 2027. City Theatre in Pittsburgh announced on 7 March 2026 that The Best of Second City would take its Main Stage from 15 to 24 April 2027 for ten performances — the company's first Pittsburgh engagement since 2021 — with subscribers offered seats at $57. Other 2027 bookings include the McAninch Arts Center at Glen Ellyn, Illinois in February, the Niswonger Performing Arts Center in Van Wert, Ohio in March, and the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco in April.