They'll cry till you laugh

Backstage last week between shows at The Second City, cast members of "South Side of Heaven" spent their dinner break armed with toy rifles, pelting one another with foam bullets. Just another day at the office, they assured a startled visitor. Pre-show ritual? You're looking at it.

"South Side of Heaven," the company's 99th mainstage revue (which opened earlier this month), is fast on its way to becoming the kind of seminal show that sketch comedy geeks will talk about for years to come. Not since the much-lauded "Pinata Full of Bees" in the mid-'90s has a show so successfully tweaked the traditional Second City format.

A loose, slap-happy demeanor pervaded the dressing room last week, but it belied the increasingly calamitous mood that took root within the group a few months earlier.

They say comedy is born out of tragedy, but the list of misfortunes that transpired during the show's gestation is almost too long to be believed.

In December, as the group was readying to begin the months-long process of creating new material, a cast member and his wife lost a child to miscarriage. Shortly thereafter Mary Scruggs, the head of writing and education programs at Second City, died at 46. Many in the cast knew her well, and her death had the impact of a sucker punch. Scruggs' funeral was the day before the first day of rehearsals.

Three weeks later came the death of 80-year-old Joyce Sloane, a fixture at Second City and the theater's unofficial den mother. During this period, the theater's veteran stage manager left the show to address a personal issue, and a member of the cast became incapacitated with a case of chronic bronchitis. The show must go on, they told each other. And it did — until February's blizzard shut the theater down for two days, along with the cast's spirit.

What else could go wrong? For a while there, inside their cocoon at Second City, it felt as if the world was falling apart. The gloom and doom left their mark, and what emerged from the emotional wreckage would become one of the darkest shows ever to grace the Wells Street stage.

Who is Billy Bungeroth?

Consider some of the bleaker moments of comedy in the show: A guy accidentally shoots his brother, who then smears the word "help" in his own blood before slumping to the floor. An audience member is asked to hold up a sign that spells out the N-word. A plane crashes. A maniacal carriage driver beats his horse before shooting it, horror-show style: "Sorry, folks, had to happen," goes the punch line. Second City revues tend to wear a loose theme, but nothing on the level of "South Side of Heaven," which is threaded with existential angst and a disorienting sense that we can never escape our fate. The aesthetic is much like a Looney Tunes cartoon brought to life. Somehow the show emerges at the end with an unmistakable sense of renewed faith.

"There was a lot of talk on the producer level of, is this overtaking the show? That was something we struggled with," Kelly Leonard, Second City executive vice president, said by phone recently. "But I look at something like 'The Book of Mormon,' for example, on Broadway (from the creators of "South Park"), and I wonder if there's something in the zeitgeist that is allowing us to do a show that is very, very dark and mean, and exceedingly sweet and optimistic. These are likable performers doing horrible things. Whatever is happening in the world right now, audiences are responding to it."

It takes a director with inventive instincts to steer all that energy to a place that feels both honest and comedic, and Second City found that in 32-year-old Billy Bungeroth, a onetime "Saturday Night Live" intern who hasn't blasted the theater's traditions out of the water so much as refined them.

"I'm drawn to comedy with a serious degree of pathos and acting," Bungeroth said backstage recently.

"I think one of the greatest fears of doing a Second City show is that it's just a rehash. It's like Wrigley Field; people will come no matter what. But even before all these obstacles were thrown in our way, this cast was always interested in the idea of breaking the form and creating something that wasn't just self-serving."

Bungeroth comes to the mainstage from the Second City e.t.c., where he directed "The Absolute Best Friggin' Time of Your Life" last year. According to Leonard, the show (which is still running) was "massively successful to a point that we hadn't really experienced before."

"Billy's a bit of a rock star," added Leonard, "and I mean that literally. Guy plays a mean guitar."

Bungeroth's musical talent is the real deal. His band, the soul-funk group JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, will play next month at Rahm Emanuel's inauguration concert in Grant Park. (The band also stars in Bailiwick Chicago's production of the Tony Award-winning rock musical "Passing Strange," which opens Monday.)

Not surprisingly, one of "South Side of Heaven's" more notable qualities is the use of music, which includes a soundtrack of surrealist circus music that gives the show a strange, off-kilter, fun-house mirror quality.

All Second City revues feature an original song or two, but this one boasts significantly more, all composed by musical director Julie B. Nichols, including the opening number "Fait Accompli" (what's done is done), a melancholic tune performed by Holly Laurent as a disaffected, out-of-work Republican, and Sam Richardson as President Barack Obama.

The first few bars, played on a '59 Wurlitzer electric piano, sound like something "Cabaret's" Kander and Ebb might have written, and it becomes a recurring melodic theme in the show. It's a level of musical sophistication not typically associated with a Second City revue.

"The pastiche element reminds me of what Baz Luhrmann was doing with 'Moulin Rouge,'" said Leonard. "I feel like Billy is skating on that rink a little bit. There is also a syncopation to the comedy in this show that is very fresh and interesting, and it's probably subliminal for the audience because you're not thinking about that. But the rhythm is so important in comedy, and I think Billy's innate understanding of music provides a key element to the show. I've done this for so long, producing since '92, and it's pretty obvious when you realize you have a show that might be different from what's come before."