With frozen toes, a wool beanie, and basic piano skills, I walked into my first rehearsal for a new performance form I was fairly unfamiliar with. Through a few conversations with friends and attending several shows, I was introduced to a comedy music improv show called MINT (Music Improv NighT) at a theatre in Chicago called MCL (Music Comedy Live). Having come from a theatre background, I was a little like WTF is this? But through attending a couple of shows, I picked up what was being thrown down. I was there to act as a Music Director (MD for short). Basically, you sit at the piano while the improv team performs, and when you can sense a scene is ready to go into “song,” you underscore and provide melodic lines for the team in whatever genre is most appropriate with the given situation. It’s fun AF.
This is only one of a plethora of shows that had the delightful opportunity of using MCL’s space, a theatre dedicated to the art form of musical improvisational comedy right north of the Wellington and Sheffield intersection in Lakeview, Chicago. It’s a theatre that dozens of anxious and unconfident kids in their 20s have called a haven for years, providing them with a safe performance platform and friends who can confide in them for the same reasons. People have grown to love, appreciate, and really need the level playing field that MCL provides, in an increasingly competitive world of comedy and improv. However, and much to all of our heartbreaks, MCL will be closing its doors on January 31, 2018. But that spirit lives on in teams that look to the audience for suggestions of ‘your favorite serial killer.’ (An actual suggestion request I’ve heard.)
I think it’s easy to say that nothing feels more confusing than being a semi-recent college grad, moving to a new city, and trying to explore an already overly saturated style of comedy in a world that continues to ask: “Is comedy dead?” Let’s just say that existential crises are probably all too familiar for many, I mean all, of us #millennials. But I could rest easy and assured that every Wednesday night, I could walk in the building with the bright green neon lights, slam back too many Bell’s Oberons, and watch some sweet, young kiddos just have fun, sing some songs, and spread the love that we are all not alone.
MCL did for me what it did for most everyone that got involved. I started doing shows there when I was at a lower point in my life. I was in that classic 24-year-old slump where nothing was interesting, and I fully believed I deserved everything in the world because I was a special goddess snowflake. Granted, it didn’t completely change the way I looked at myself (I’m still a goddess snowflake), but it definitely help me get out of my own head. MCL helped remind me that teamwork makes the dreamwork, and that if we all leave this world making any mark, it should probably surround something that was much bigger than ourselves. And that’s what MCL is, and will always be: a theatre that puts narcissism at the door and spreads love and joy with some silly songs about a talking sandwich.
I don’t know if comedy is dead. But love and acceptance certainly is not dead, and it will never die. And as much as 2017 has been an incredibly trying year of incompetent government officials, bigotry and violence, and a zit on my chin that just WON’T GO AWAY, Chicago will have this spirit of a haven of love that has sparked beautiful friendships, romances good and bad, and moments of self-realization that we are all nothing without the communities around us.
Although MCL will close its doors in a few months, the energy and positive spirit will teem through both Chicago’s small, indie improv theatre houses, as well as the big-guy improv theatres for like, ever. I will be sad to see her go, but happy to know that the love poured out from the countless silly shows will continue to bring smiles on the most frustrating of days.
Thanks for the memories MCL, have a good summer, and will you sign my yearbook?