by Sam Wasson
And then one day Bernie Sahlins walked into a rehearsal and asked, “Anyone here want to go up and start a theater in Toronto?”
The company scratched their heads. None of his cast knew much about Toronto, let alone Canada. Bernie himself knew only slightly more. Since the mid-1960s, he had seen moderate success bringing companies north to the Royal Alexandra Theatre, and at the urging of Nathan Cohen, Toronto Star critic and stalwart Second City fan, he guessed further investigation was in order.
“You’ll love it,” Sahlins insisted. “I saw Medea up there and they did the entire play in Greek!”
They didn’t quite know what to say. Setting up in New York was one thing. Or Los Angeles. Or even playing Cleveland or Ann Arbor, as touring companies sometimes would. At least those cities shared their American sense of humor, topical references, and politics. But Canada? Comedy?
“Why don’t I book you a show up there?” Sahlins suggested. “Look around. See what you think.”
What the hell, Joe Flaherty thought. Old Town, the neighborhood around Second City, was starting to look a little dingy anyway. “Well, okay. Sure.”
As the group’s senior member and informal captain, Flaherty set the pace for the rest of the cast. In no time he was leading Harold Ramis, John Belushi, Jim Fisher, Eugenie Ross-Leming, and others to the University of Toronto to play a one-night-only show for college students, Bernie’s ideal audience, and prospective backers.
To their astonishment, the whole experience came off: the show was a hit and the city itself, emerging from the conservative cold years of British cultural dominion, opening its arms to art and artists, basement coffeehouses and funky, folky sidewalk jam sessions, was ready for change. How green, Joe Flaherty thought, how clean! How much lovelier was young Toronto than old Old Town, which had only gotten rougher since Flaherty arrived in 1969. The trolleys, the red brick Victorian row houses, the nonstop sky; the streets around the university—it was a picture postcard of a booming pioneer town on the crest of a renaissance.
After the show Sahlins took Flaherty and company, along with some very happy backers, to a celebratory steak dinner near the University Theatre. In sadness and jubilation, Gilda Radner, who had been in the audience and loved the show, watched them leave without her. Ever since she was a girl, Gilda had known about these people, improvisational comedians. Her camp friends, Chicago kids, were the first to tell her about Second City. Years later, she saw them play Detroit, but it wasn’t until Second City came to the University of Michigan, where Gilda, then a student, had started her own improv group, that the switch was flipped. “That’s what you should do,” someone said to her on their way from the auditorium. It was not Gilda, though, but a friend of hers who had been invited to join the improvisers for dinner that night in Toronto. Her nose pressed to the restaurant window, Gilda watched them throw their arms around each other and laugh. Their stage was their imaginations. “It’s like getting to be a child again for a little while,” Gilda thought, “to be naive, to have empty spaces that can be filled in. What’s so sad about so many grown-ups is they lose those spaces.”
10
1973–1974
We go north now to Toronto through a mesh of maple leaves and up to a brick Victorian row house like all the others—at least from the outside—along the preposterously named Avenue Road. Inside number 1063, home of former McMaster college students Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Dave Thomas, you would find anywhere from two to a dozen uncommonly free and funny people, many of them the McMaster boys’ new actor friends from Godspell, then running downtown at the Royal Alexandra, gathered together for what they called Friday Night Services, their postshow all-night Big Chill of impromptu songs and comedy, wherein the likes of Danny Aykroyd and his partner, Valri Bromfield—Nichols and May, but insane—would take over the living room sofa and motormouth back and forth in characters they could sustain, to the wonderment of all, for literally hours, the pint-sized hurricane Andrea Martin, up for anything and already a thousand ideas ahead of you, crowded into the dining room with Dave and Eugene and Gilda Radner and Catherine O’Hara beside Paul Shaffer at the upright piano they had instead of a dining room table, playing the first big notes of Marty’s entrance music, Short’s cue to emerge from the proscenium archway to the kitchen, holding a spoon for a mic, and parodying out a signature tune they all recognized, courtesy of the Buffalo feed, from American television. “No one watched Canadian television,” Short said. “It was no influence at all. Our influences were American television. We were kids who could never imagine being in show business because show business was on the planet Neptune. It was in the United States.”
Though it was only just across the border, the paradise of American entertainment, what these twenty-two-year-olds had grown up watching on TV, was impossibly far away, likelier to appear in dreams than life. No, they would never make it; never really make it. This was Canada, after all, the Second Country, land of watch but don’t touch. Short grew up in front of his parents’ living room television, feasting on the dream people of Showland, Jack Paar and his guests, Nichols and May, Judy Garland, Oscar Levant, and the blindfolded uptowners of What’s My Line? (“Are you opening a film this week?”; “Could I have seen you at Sardi’s last night?”) As a boy of ten, Marty wanted to be there, in tuxedo, howling with them at their inside jokes. “What sticks in my mind,” he said, “is how hard these people were laughing. You felt like you were part of a party that there was no way you’d ever be invited to.” Number 1063 was theirs.
They dreamed in ridiculous parody, aping the outsize careers they wanted but couldn’t have, moving the coffee table out of the way and turning 1063 into an improv stage and laughing to life a living room carnival of their showbiz gods, their idols. “Everybody was really at their funniest,” Shaffer said, “because the audience was each other.”
They didn’t have studio cameras, so they made cassette tapes. In one, they improvised as other Godspell cast members.
“This is so mean!” Shaffer laughed. “We can’t be doing this!”
“Gilda, you play Avril!”
“The best roles! Always given the best roles!”
You had to be funny to get in, but to stay in, you had to stay funny, which was difficult when everyone around you, riff after spectacular riff, was actually getting funnier; when Andrea, who went farther than you could imagine, surprised everyone by actually going farther, dropping to the floor and improvising as a wolf getting eaten out. No one in North America was as funny as Andrea Martin. Except for Marty, Eugene, Dave, Gilda, Danny . . . huge-hearted maniacs and friends. The spirit of 1063 was fast and nurturing, a trellis of disparate blooms linking tendrils and curling upward, together. “Opportunity was inherent in Canadian culture,” Bromfield said, “because nobody was looking at us; we were left alone in a hothouse to grow. Nobody said no to us. We pushed each other and we laughed at each other. And we made that the most important thing in our lives.” There were no Eve Harringtons because, in the tiny world of Toronto entertainment, there were no Margo Channings; making a little money, working regularly, the denizens of 1063 were already living their dreams. Jealousy and competition, therefore, did not exist. “When we started in Godspell,” Short said, “people just couldn’t believe they didn’t have to study for exams anymore. We had ambition, but it was ‘I hope I can keep working so I don’t have to go back to school.’”
Catherine O’Hara, at nineteen the youngest of the gang, was too shy to jump up and join Short and Shaffer at the piano. “Marty did so many characters,” she said, “that he could improvise to infinity. He’ll jump into anything. He just goes.” O’Hara, however, felt a little like an interloper at 1063, which pounded with musical people; she had auditioned for Godspell and didn’t get in. Though, as one of seven children, having grown up under funny parents and grandparents in a three-bedroom house where “freedom was encouraged from an early age,” O’Hara was at home in a noisy room. After dinner at her parents’ house in Toronto
, she and her brother Marcus, and Gilda, would play improv games with Mrs. O’Hara, lifting her up in the air and bringing her down, “like one of those old workshop exercises.”
“We were all family people,” O’Hara said of her circle. “We came from big, loud families.”
Those were days of surplus, of love and fleeting crushes, and resounding yeses to (d) all of the above. Marty Short marveled at Gilda, in overalls and pigtails, though, presently, she was spoken for and anyway Marty would come to love the bright and beautiful singer, Nancy Dolman; her brother Bob, dashing and erudite, would soon fall for Andrea and Andrea for Bob, though Andrea, for the moment, was with Eugene, who was soon to discover the adorable Deb Divine, whose roommate, Mary Ann, was seeing Paul Shaffer, and everyone, at some point, fell in love with Gilda. Let me revise that: everyone loved period. A huge laugh at 1063 induced in all a flutter of admiration, a ray of hot honey shot to the nerves. “In those days,” Andrea Martin said, “sex was like an extension of laughter.” “Or vice versa,” O’Hara would add. “I find laughing sexy, so forget it. That’s why everybody dated everybody. When you start laughing, you think, ‘Oh, wait. Maybe . . .’”
You could say they had been perfectly cast. Godspell, a freewheeling Jesus musical by Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak, wanted not traditional musical theater performers, but flavorful personalities, individuals. Technique they sidelined; Schwartz and his team were looking to cast the actor, not the role. Highly improvisational and ensemble-oriented, Godspell auditions were (and always have been) specifically geared to reveal the raw goods of young talent. “Godspell was basically the only comedy opportunity in Toronto,” said Dave Thomas. “A lighthouse for like minds.”
Most of the other theatrical opportunities for the hopefuls of Avenue Road were in small, stuffy dinner theaters, where you could drink and watch a deadly serious play—“my long, slow, snowy walk to death,” the actress Jayne Eastwood dubbed the genre that was “incest and wolves” to improviser Robin Duke—but truthfully, you went for the booze. In those days, good Toronto bars were hard to come by. To win their liquor licenses, proprietors had to have restaurant licenses, ergo any theater that wanted to sell drinks had to be a restaurant too. That spelled dinner theater—not exactly a big draw to the world’s foremost theatrical artists or Canada’s untapped comedy fringe. And so, to a young funny actor in Toronto, Godspell was the sun coming up.
Eugene Levy dragged Marty Short out of final exams to audition the very day Andrea Martin blew through the theater like a gale wind, the same day he first saw Gilda, jacked up, Short recalled, “like a demented child at the peak of a sugar rush,” blaring out to Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” with more charm than skill alongside piano accompaniment by Paul Shaffer, who had only come because a friend slipped him twenty bucks to play for her. (Spotting a good thing, Schwartz fired his musical director and hired Shaffer on the spot—a far better gig than playing the Hammond B-3 at the strip clubs of Yonge Street.) As for the others, they all got in. “This,” Schwartz said, “was the funniest Godspell company we had ever seen.” Those who didn’t make the cut complained Schwartz & Co. didn’t know what they were doing, just hiring kids off the street. In fact, though he didn’t know it at the time—and neither, for that matter, did they—he hired born improvisers. “It’s no accident that so many of the [Toronto] Godspell cast wound up doing Second City,” Schwartz said, “because other than the musical component it’s essentially the same skill set.”
And so when Bernie Sahlins came to town with Del Close, Joe Flaherty, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Joyce Sloane to scope the talent for Toronto’s first Second City company, he bought his recruiters seats to Godspell, the hottest ticket, probably, in the nation, and pretty much stopped the theatergoing leg of his search right there. “We didn’t love the show,” Flaherty said, “but we knew these guys were the real ticket.” After the show, Joyce got in touch with the cast and invited them to audition. Del and Flaherty wanted Eugene; for a young actor in such a flamboyant show, he showed an impressive amount of self-control, Buster Keaton amid the Marx Brothers. When Bernie argued for the more attention-hungry Gerry Salsberg, Flaherty rolled his eyes. If they couldn’t agree on the qualifications, why had Bernie invited them to come along? It seemed Bernie himself was improvising his way through the casting process, alternately looking for guidance from and giving direction to a panel of judges with tastes as disparate as their personalities. In the old days, casting would have been a job for Paul Sills, but without a strong, consistent artistic vision to lead the charge, the little band of improvisers, under Bernie, came to the plate like the Bad News Bears. Back at the Royal York hotel after the show, the discussion continued, and Flaherty confessed to Doyle-Murray he had his reservations about the whole business. “What are they”—meaning the Canadians—“going to know about improv?” he wondered aloud. Doyle-Murray agreed. How Canada’s first improvisational theater would get off the ground was anybody’s guess.
On the day of the auditions, Bernie’s team took their seats in a church they rented in Yorkville, the Haight-Ashbury of Toronto, and crossed their fingers they were casting their net wide enough. (“Bernie,” Flaherty said, “wasn’t big on advertising.”) Of those who trickled in, not one among them saw Second City as more than just another job opportunity. Among those who had heard or at least heard of Nichols and May, only a handful could trace their beginnings back to the Compass, and of that handful, only Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield regarded their native medium as something like an art.
Aykroyd had been hip to Spolin for the better part of his adult life; at the age of twelve, his parents had enrolled him in improv classes at the Ottawa Little Theatre. “The instructor Brian Gordon was aware of commedia dell’arte, Pirandello, all the absurdist playwrights and also of the American improvisation movement that emerged in the late 1950s,” Aykroyd said. “He was teaching us this stuff in the classes: sharing and giving; not to take too much; how to overcome fear and build self-confidence on stage; how to not be afraid of flying, dying and trying.” Valri heard him before she met him. Aykroyd did characters in the tunnel connecting his Catholic boys’ school to her Catholic girls’ school. She thought: That guy with one eyebrow is one funny guy. “He reminded me of my brother,” she said. “I loved him.” Bromfield, who had lightning in her eyes and mouth and improvised unremittingly, did voices too, strong, pushy women, women on fire. They bubbled up in her in class when she should have been paying attention. “Sitting there, bored,” she said, “you just activate sporadically. It’s a firing of one’s brain. You get a fact in your brain and extrapolate on that fact.” When Aykroyd walked between classes, the tunnels echoed with data, dates, facts, serial numbers. “He could have been a surgeon or a comic or anything,” Bromfield said. “He knew everything in that wonderful obsessive way. I loved his brain. So we made friends.”
At Carleton University in Ottawa, he went in for sociology and criminology and abnormal psych, anything that would bring him the full gamut of human deviance and diversity, “the hawks, the doves, the rights, the lefts,” he said. “The radicals, the racists, bigots, humanitarians. The Feds, the criminals—I’ve got to know them all, because those are the stories.” Those people lived in him. Aykroyd—whose friend Nancy Dolman recognized as ten people in one—was their warden, and the tunnel voices Bromfield heard, jailbreaks. From Toronto, she convinced him to drop out of college, join up with her, and develop their act. “I definitely led in the booking of things,” she said, “in building our team.” Of the two, Bromfield had the most professional experience. She had already worked with Lorne Michaels, whose secret combination of calm and ambition Bromfield found confidence-inspiring. “I had never met anyone so young,” she said, “who had that.”
For fifty bucks, they rented Saturday-night space at Toronto’s Factory Theatre Lab, and paper-flyered the streets with news of a midnight show. People came. “We would dress up as parents,” Bromfield said, “and improvise,
sometimes for hours.” From Nichols and May—“they were God,” Bromfield said—Aykroyd and Bromfield learned the value of listening, of trusting the pauses, “the very thing,” Bromfield explained, “that people are afraid of socially. That’s where the laugh is.” But they also understood speed. If Mike and Elaine waltzed the parquet, Danny and Valri dove onto it hands first, slid across the room, and flew out through the window. “Danny and Valri were wild,” Dave Thomas said, “and so fast.” Read this aloud at top speed: “Waiter, what’s the soup de jour?” “What day is it today?” “Wednesday.” “Wednesday soup.”
They played wherever they could. In addition to late nights at Factory Theatre Lab and Global Village, they played coffeehouses and gay bars (following a transvestite named Pascal), 1063 Avenue Road, the backseat of Gilda’s car, the front of Aykroyd’s ’63 Chevy, between stops on his mail run, during dinners of borrowed soup and beans, and out loud in public, up and down the busy streets of Toronto, spontaneously breaking into character for beguiling marathon arguments about absolutely nothing. “Everybody was improvising,” Bromfield said. “I’d go to visit Marty and Gilda at Gilda’s house and they’d put socks on their hands and do puppet shows. They just didn’t capitalize on it the way Danny and I did.”
Local comedy’s homecoming king and queen, Danny and Valri were Second City shoo-ins, but they were nonetheless terrified of the “Five Through the Door” audition process. The form was clean and challenging. First, improvisers were broken into pairs. One to play a desk clerk; the other to enter through the stage door in character, engage the clerk, then exit and reenter as a completely different character—five times. Then the improvisers switch roles. Were each improviser’s five characters distinct? Were they intelligent enough for Bernie? Fully inhabited enough for Doyle-Murray? Risky enough for Del? Funny enough for Flaherty? Did they have a point of view? Were they jokey or real? And most of all did the improvisers listen to each other?
