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Second City Northwest
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True, there are some soft focuses, easy touches, and brand humor here: masochistically loyal Cubs fans, Dawn Clark Netsch as pool shark, Michael Jordan’s fielding. But something like “Love at First Sight” is a laugh symphony: a mousy spinster previews her video dates, a parade of DOA losers played with quick-change dexterity, seemingly re-creating every love fiasco in the book. Here the lure is character-driven comedy, and the results are whimsical scenes in which everyone looks good. “Decent Proposal” examines two couples negotiating touchingly different marriage proposals: one, the clumsy couple, exchange a pop-top ring, while the other are their emotionally adept friends. This richly textured tale changes with each character.
Providing strong musical support, Mark Levenson’s songs include a Guys and Dolls-style send-up of casino gambling, a semi-idealistic ballad about changing the world tomorrow, and an animal-rights anthem, sung with deadpan dryness, attacking the cruelties of cooking chicken on a rotisserie. (Oddly, the same style of cooking is praised in Second City’s mainstage show in a tribute to Boston chicken.)
In a world where real life is pillaged for sound bites and computer bytes, Jack’s job at DAS (“Dead Actor Simulation”) is to retrieve dead actors like Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn and distort their celluloid essences to fit the omnisexual tastes of his time. But Jack also has his own sexual quest–to use the “cybergrid” to clone his bisexual radical-feminist girlfriend Liz, who left him to pursue a politically correct mission to the moon. Penetrating the company’s surveillance system that monitors his every moment, macho control freak Jack accesses his taped past in order to construct a more pliable Liz than the real one was; at the same time the MEDCOM honchos are trying to thwart Jack’s Frankensteinian activities.
