Today we’d like to introduce you to D’Arcy Stuart.
D’Arcy, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have been working in, and now running, all of my family’s businesses since I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2008. These are an assortment of retail, entertainment, and professional services firms. My wife and I moved to Chicago in early 2015 to help our longtime partner and current Second City CEO Andrew Alexander with a large expansion of the Second City Training Centers in Chicago and Toronto. It has been a wild ride since then, due to a fire that nearly closed the business in August of 2015. Only since March have our Chicago employees been back under one (newly constructed) roof, and the projects we’re working on could fill the rest of this article and more.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The Second City – what should we know?
The Second City is best known for its resident company shows, which have been running continuously in Chicago and Toronto for decades. While performing newly written material every night in front of an audience, a cast of actors and a director write and refine scenes, and organize them into a 2-act revue format. In a process of continuous renewal, a discrete new Second City show is created on each main stage about every 8 months. In the course of a typical Second City career, actors (who are also writers), practice comedy for many tens of thousands of hours. For this reason, we are known as the best place for aspiring comedians to hone their craft, while making a living. It is an extremely competitive environment for talent, and also an incredibly vibrant community, particularly in Chicago, where other important institutions such as Improv Olympic and The Annoyance Theater make big contributions to the city’s reputation for incubating talent through the art and practice of improv. Over the years, Second City has created other businesses enabled by improv, sketch, and social and political satire. These include the Second City Training Centers, The Second City Touring Companies, and Second City Works.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
The Second City creative process is at the heart and soul of the theater’s enduring success. The executive producers of the theater, notably Andrew Alexander, and Bernie Sahlins before him, pursue a strict policy of producer non-interference in the creation of every show. The cast, the director (and more recently, the musical director and technical directors), write, improvise, evaluate, refine, and reorder their performances in an organic process with the audiences over the course of about 12 weeks. The power of this discipline, combined with the raw creative magic of improvisation, is what creates and sustains the relevance of Second City’s art.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1616 N. Wells St.,
Chicago, IL 60614 - Website: www.secondcity.com
- Phone: (312) 337-3992
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesecondcity/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesecondcity/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSecondCity
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-second-city-chicago
- Other: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g35805-d266629-Reviews-Second_City-Chicago_Illinois.html
Image Credit:
Timothy M Schmidt
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