Daily Sitka Sentinel

Second City Troupe Visit a Sitka First

The Second City’s traveling troupe is booked for the Performing Arts Center Tuesday May 4.  (Photo provided)

By TOM HESSE

Sentinel Staff Writer

An American comedy institution is coming to Sitka next week – The Second City’s traveling troupe is booked at the Performing Arts Center. 

The Chicago-based improv group – whose alums include Dan Aykroyd, Alan Arkin, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Chris Farley and Bill Murray – will bring to a Sitka stage some of the iconic material from the organization’s 50-year history in the “Best of The Second City” show.

The Sitka Fine Arts Camp was able to snag the legendary group for a show here as a part of the troupe’s larger Alaska tour.

“We were able to catch a couple days at the beginning of their tour, otherwise there’s no way we would ever get a group like this,” Sitka Fine Arts Camp director Roger Schmidt said.

The $25 ticket price is a steal for  such a show, he said.

“Even if you lived in Chicago, it’s cheaper to go to a show here in Sitka than it would be to see the same act in Chicago,” he said. 

Julie Marchiano is the newest addition to the group, which has performed in Idaho, Florida and Vermont this year ahead of the four-show tour of Alaska. 

In a phone interview with the Sentinel Marchiano talked about taking a show on the road.

“It’s very fun,’ she said. “It’s always changing. It’s a lot of late-night cheeseburgers in the hotel room. It’s really great to see a lot of amazing places that I wouldn’t otherwise expect to go to.”

The eight actors on the tour perform bits that go all the way back to the 1960s. Marchiano said it’s an interesting experience for the actors to go back through the archives to find stuff to put in front of an audience again.

“We see certain things we were able to joke about in the ’90s that we aren’t able to joke about now. Like words that we were really comfortable using 20 years ago aren’t so PC now, which means we either have to change that or scrap the segment all together,” she said. “It’s crazy to look at the political landscape. You’ll be going through old shows and realize, oh, this was definitely an election season – like there was a lot of Bush-hate in the 2000s.” 

For that reason, none of the material is stale. Marchiano said a number of adjustments have to be made to  be a little more modern or to make it a little more accessible for a local audience. And sometimes both are called for. 

“There’s certain things that we will take out. We do one blackout, which is a quick scene that’s just a few lines, in a bookstore. Originally it was in Borders, but now when we go somewhere we have to change it to something different, like whatever the local bookstore in town is, because, of course, Borders doesn’t exist any more.” 

Marchiano started moving toward improv as a student at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, but she’s always been attracted to stage comedy.

“I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live as a kid to the point that when I was in middle school, and it was cool to go over to your friend’s house and have a sleepover, I said ‘I can’t because I have to watch Saturday Night Live,’” Marchiano said, adding that when she got to college she found she loved the stage, even if no one quite knew where she fit on it. 

“I kind of discovered improv then, and I was doing it regularly then in college and after college. Improv is such a fun thing. When I was trying to get into acting in college they said I was good but they didn’t really know what they could do with me, which I thought was weird. This is acting. It’s supposed to be pretend, can’t we do whatever we want?” 

Marchiano said she’s more of a performer than a writer, although all members of The Second City do some original writing. 

“I’ve always been a performer first. I was so scared to write before I came to Second City. I had all these ideas that I didn’t know what to do with, or how to do them, so I went to their conservatory where they work with us on styles of writing and how to get your own pieces out there, and that was very helpful,” Marchiano said. 

“But I still consider myself a performer first. I need the attention,” she quipped. 

The Alaska tour will go to Sitka, Juneau, Anchorage and Homer. Schmidt said bringing in Second City is one of the Fine Arts Camp’s more ambitious ventures, but they couldn’t pass it up. 

“This is really something that we just felt like was a great, great opportunity for the community. And that’s something that should be healthy for the community – to get something fun and funny,” Schmidt said. 

This is Marchiano’s first trip to Alaska.

“We’re just so thrilled to be coming up there. I just joined in January, I’m the newest member and I’ve known this group was going to Alaska so I was telling all my friends that it was going there,” she said. “Every weekend that I leave town people have asked me ‘is this the weekend, is this the weekend,’ and I’m always like, ‘No. It’s just Iowa this time.’ So I’m really excited to finally have the chance to go.” 

Seeing a new place means Marchiano gets to experience one of her favorite parts of being on the road with the group, and that’s seeing how new people react to the material. The performers will tweak bits for different audiences, but Marchiano said part of the fun for her is just seeing how different parts of the country respond to different styles of comedy. 

“I’m so interested to see how much people know about Second City. My favorite part about the job is introducing people to Second City and to improv comedy and seeing their reaction, because every town reacts in a different way,” she said. 

The Second City will perform at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $25, or $20 for students and seniors, and are available at Old Harbor Books.