Kelly Leonard Quotations

When we were talking to them about the marketing, I said traditional theater marketing never works for us. We need college students, we need young people who wouldn't necessarily go to Denver Center. We get a lot of people at Second City who don't know they're coming to an Actors' Equity theater. A lot of marketing we're doing is promoting Red Scare without the Second City name or the Denver Center name.

But there's also differences between Detroit and Chicago.

I think everything has been politicized, so certainly the material now I think is a bit sharper and in some respects edgier than what was going on pre-9/11.

We're trying to create a habit of movement.

There's a couple of lines that I wonder if they won't go down with certain kinds of crowds when we're really exploring this fight between the right and the left. The thing that I've been so impressed with Denver Center folks is that they get it, and not once did anyone say that you should try to soften something down.

There's nothing in the show that I don't think is necessarily balanced. It'd be a lie to say that the bulk of the people who wrote it were not of the left, or left-leaning, (but) we try to be as fair as possible.

The breast exam never would have made it (in the past), or it would have been the one 'chick scene' in the show. That was the language that would have been used. There's always more men who take classes than women, so there's more white men getting into this business.

A lot of times when people learn this improvisation stuff, they're drinking the Kool-Aid, and you're creating zealots for your work by showing them how to do it.

It's one of those choices where, yeah, it's a brave choice, but it could really bring the house down.

I've done this wrong a couple times, not knowing the market I went into. We have been scouring the papers and trying to understand where it is that we're going.

For the audience, that's the most fun time to come to Second City, because truly anything will happen.

The folks in Denver just get it, from the point of view that Second City starts with coming in and looking at the (historical pictures of old Second City casts) on the wall.

The great thing about Second City is we do write the show in front of the audience.