MOCHRIE SNAGS A CLASSICAL EDUCATION

Comedian, Second City join with CPO for witty guide to symphony

Giggling.

It’s not the sort of sound you expect from a professional symphony.

But it tends to happen when orchestras team up with Second City Players to poke fun at themselves, as the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra will have plenty of opportunity to do on Saturday with The Second City Guide to the Symphony.

“When we are actually doing the show, you just see the fun, pleasurable looks on their faces,” says comedian Colin Mochrie, a Second City alumni who hosts the show. “Some of them get to improvise with us, which is good for them. There’s a theme that is written for every symphony that we play with and it talks about particular members of the orchestra and their little quirks and hidden talents. That’s a really fun sketch, I think for them and for us.”

So members of the CPO will be making what is presumably, at least for most of them, their comedic debut with The Second City Guide to the Symphony on Saturday at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, attempting to keep a straight face while participating in sketches that skewer the rarefied world of symphonies, composers and classical music audiences.

Mochrie hosted the show in its original incarnation back in 2014, when Second City teamed up with the esteemed Toronto Symphony. Since then, the troupe has travelled to Washington D.C. to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra and to Denver to perform with the Colorado Symphony.

Inspired by Chicago’s Second City similarly irreverent take on the opera, the original production earned rave reviews in Toronto. In Calgary, comedy sketches will be matched with music by Mozart, Wagner and Mikhail Glinka. While most of the sketches have been pre-written, there is one segment of improvisation featuring Second City players and four members of the orchestra conspiring to come up with off-the-cuff songs.

But for the most part, the comedy comes from skewering a culture that tends to take itself very seriously.

“The more serious something is, the more you can make fun of it quite easily,” says Mochrie. “We make fun of everyone from Gustav Mahler to the audience itself. We have the audience, at one point, become an orchestra. So there’s some audience participation. So it’s fun and I think it brings out a different audience from the symphony usually gets.”

While Mochrie has become known for his appearances on the U.S. improvisation series Whose Line Is It Anyway? he is most closely associated with Canadian comedy. That includes a threeyear stint with Second City in Toronto in the late 1980s.

“It’s like the mafia, you never leave Second City,” Mochrie says. “They always bring you back. They asked me if I would be interested in hosting the show and doing some sketches with the kids and I said yes. I love learning about worlds I have no idea about. And the world of classical music and symphonies was very foreign to me.”

But, since his involvement in The Second City Guide to the Symphony, Mochrie has broadened his horizons and attended a few noncomedic classical music shows and plays classical music at home. He hopes Calgarians display a similar sense of adventure.

“People are always a little scared about something they are ignorant about and don’t have a lot of knowledge of,” Mochrie says. “I had a shallow understanding of the symphony, but getting to work with them and just seeing the incredible artistry they do and the work they put into it and then hearing that music. Music is such a foreign thing to me anyway. I don’t understand how people do it, how they do it well. To see all these different people with different instruments come together as one and make this incredible piece of music, it really piqued my interest. I hope people give it a chance and broaden their world. Learning about something certainly can’t hurt your life.”