Most trips to Second City, the theatre thats been a staple of Canadas comedy and arts scene since opening in Toronto in 1973, involve a little less drywall dust and a little more stage banter. Luckily, the theatres artistic director Kevin Frank is here, and as a former student-cum-actor in the troupe, the laughs are on the house.
Clothes on or off? he asks me as he poses on the new stage. Ive been doing a lot of sit-ups lately. This could be my big break.
Frank is overseeing the expansion of the theatres new training centre, opening 8,000 square feet of theatre, training and lounge space on the third floor of 99 Blue Jays Way, attached to the companys historic theatre itself. Its a big leap in space from the training centres current digs, in the basement of 70 Peter Street, which will remain open. The expansion is a testament to the explosion in popularity that Second City, and improv across Toronto, has experienced.
Our classes got so packed that we had to begin turn people away,” says Frank. “We have a waiting list of about 250 students that cant get into classes, so we knew it was time to expand.
The waiting lists built out of a combination of factors: A change to the structure of the classes themselves to make them more accommodating and a broadening of the range of themes that the improv classes cover (including courses for people with social anxiety and a swath of business improv classes). The popularity of their classes for businesses even spawned a book, Yes, And: Lessons from the Second City, released in February.
As Klaus Schuller, the training centres producer and executive director says, improv for business isn’t as strange as it sounds. The roots of Second City improv actually go back to social work, not just comedy, he says as we tour the new centres eight classrooms. “Viola Spolin, who developed the games that actually became the basis for the Second City method, originally was trying to use theatre to improve socialization for recent immigrants.
Its no wonder, then, that the theatres non-comedy offerings are filling up at such a fast pace. Much of this has been due to Franks improvise-anything approach. After taking over as artistic director in 2008, he began to send out feedback forms to his students that he diligently read and drew inspiration from.
What we found was a lot of students taking a class and then asking us, Whats next? They would get stuck between improv class levels, so we did things like try to make the transitions between the levels easier.
This focus on retention, along with the new program offerings, has allowed Frank to watch as annual class membership has ballooned from just over 2,000 a decade ago to almost 6,000 now.
Franks roots in the theatre company run deep, as he began teaching after a run in the Second Citys national touring troupe. In 2008, he took over as artistic director. I figured, Ive been here long enough, maybe Im good at something else. Im still teaching, but Im the principal now too.
Hes a pretty damn bad principal, Richard Gasee, the theatres marketing manager, chimes in with a laugh. With him here, everybody wants to get sent to the office.
