Once upon a time, you could switch on your TV in December and sink into a spectacular year-end special. Bleak skies, frigid temperatures and, God help us, the news, would be kept at bay for an hour or two as you luxuriated in comedy, music and holiday cheer with the King Family, Dean Martin, the Lennon Sisters, and Patti LaBelle. Some say those days are gone. Some do not live near Evanston’s Studio5, the headquarters of the Practical Theatre Company.
The Practical Theatre Company had these specials in mind as they created their 2023 HO-HO-HOLIDAY Revue. The PTC is Paul Barrosse, Victoria Zielinski, Dana Olsen and newest member Emilia Barrosse, who is also Paul and Victoria’s daughter. Paul co-founded the PTC with Brad Hall as Northwestern students in 1978. Victoria later became a key member of the ensemble. Paul and Dana met at Northwestern’s Mee-Ow Show. Between the four, they’ve written hit TV series and movies in just about every decade since. Emmy Award winning composer Steve Rashid writes the Revue’s music and leads the band. Professional dancer Beá Rashid is choreographer.
The Practical Theatre went from Northwestern to a storefront on Howard Street to a partnership with Second City owner Bernie Sahlins where the Piper’s Alley Theatre (now the Second City e.t.c. space) was designed and built especially for them. Paul, Brad, Gary Kroeger and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were scooped up by Saturday Night Live (as Victoria was finishing her law degree). Dana left for Hollywood where he immediately became a writer on Laverne & Shirley. He would go on to write The Burbs, the George of the Jungle movie and to create Nickelodeon’s Henry Danger. Emilia recently returned to Chicago after many successful years writing for HBO’s Veep and TruTV’s Tacoma F.D.
The PTC has always been known for its particular blend of wit, intelligence, silliness, daring and a unique ability to expand the horizons of sketch comedy. Looking back at their acclaimed 1980s show, Art, Ruth & Trudy, Victoria recalled, “we had an absolutely suicidal sketch called “Flying Drunks” about three circus performers who are drunk on a trapeze. We didn’t have mats and my whole body was black and blue.”
Forty years later, there will be no trapeze. There will be comedic high wire acts. Expect bold original takes on topical subjects and divine interpretations of certain human affairs. I don’t want to give anything away, but there may be Greek gods in marital therapy. There will be some classic Practical Theatre, but 80% is brand new sketches. I was fortunate to see a preview. For the first time in months, I was in tears solely from laughing so hard. You will discover that Paul sings like Gordon Lightfoot and his magnetic comedic presence will make you forget your sorrows. Victoria is on par with Elaine May and Gilda Radner. Dana has impeccable timing, “rizz” all day, and a dry delivery that makes every utterance hilarious. Emilia is a moving Millennial foil. Witnessing her standup and acting, you understand immediately why she was an invaluable member of two critically acclaimed writers’ rooms.
Studio5 is a gorgeous space deceptively embedded in a strip mall with literally acres of free parking. You will be greeted by the friendliest folks at the door and the bar, sometimes by one of the owners, Beá Rashid herself. The atmosphere is like a cabaret party in a close friend’s living room.
Paul, Victoria, Dana and Emilia kindly Zoomed with me to talk about how this Revue came together. They finish each other’s sentences yet constantly surprise and delight each other – and everyone around them, too.
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SNEAK PREVIEW
Teme: What can you reveal about the HO-HO- HOLIDAY Revue 2023?
Paul: Without giving too much away, it’s a comedy revue within a variety show format. There are more musical numbers than we ordinarily do and there’s some very terrible dancing that we’ll do –
Victoria: … through no fault of Beá Rashid who is working with us night and day.
Paul: She’s going to give us wonderful steps –
Victoria: … that we can’t match.
Emilia: Speak for yourselves. I’ll look great up there.
Dana: I wouldn’t call it dancing, I would call it movement.
Victoria: Well, he likes to call it movement. It’s probably that.
Dana: It’s choreography.
Paul: Well, Dana and Emilia will dance and the rest of us will move someplace.
Victoria: We have a wonderful number based on the three remaining liberal female members of the Supreme Court, of course, based on The Supremes. We were working on it last night. It’s got a lot of harmony. Beá was here thinking up choreography and I said, “Oh Jesus!” But we’ll get it. Right, Emilia?
Emilia: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: Well, one of us will. We come out and we’re singing in three-part harmony. It’s meant to be a pure romp, and it’s also got its distinct political point of view that we hope isn’t too heavy-handed. Some of us are trying always to make it less heavy-handed. Emilia and I, for example, had a dispute over a line in “The Supremes.” May I?
Dana: I don’t know why not.
Victoria: The line goes, “we’ve got to keep the separation between state and church, since Ruth Bader Ginsburg left us in the lurch.” Emilia had some serious doubts. I think chastising Ruth Bader Ginsburg for staying on the court long after she should have is worthy of mention. We also reckon with this whole idea of aging in government. Diane Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were both distinguished, powerful trailblazers for women, but both of them –
Paul: … stayed too long.
Victoria: I guess nobody thought Hillary wouldn’t win, but you can’t gamble like that when you know you’re dying.
Paul: And of course, in her case, it undid-
Victoria: … abortion and –
Paul: … some of her legacy work prior to becoming a member of the court. She should have seen that coming. But at any rate –
Dana [dryly]: … this is all very funny stuff.
Victoria: Now that’s funny.
A BALANCING ACT
Teme: How did you choose your topics?
Paul: These are the things on our minds after this year. We figured they’re also going to be on the minds of our audience. But we are also doing some domestic sketches and stuff that has nothing to do with politics or cultural events.
Victoria: Domestic sketches have all to do with politics.
Dana: We balance. We have a little political commentary, and then do something silly and then do something from the human experience. We tried out [our sketch] “Thoughts and Prayers” in our summer revue and it got a lot of very interesting response in addition to laughs. People going, “Ooh” and hissing and stuff. I love getting a response like that.
Paul: In that case, they were hissing my character for saying “thoughts and prayers” because it was so in the pocket for this guy to be such a hypocrite. Now knowing that’s the kind of response that got we’ve actually-
Dana: … added and –
Paul: … written a new musical number that follows it up where this guy is literally doing the same old song and dance –
Victoria: … with backup singers this time.
BLOSSOMING
Teme: When are you most proud of in this new Revue?
Paul: It’s fun when you start to see all the elements come together. It’s one thing to write a song and tinker with the lyrics, but then to hear it come together with harmony, and then once the band gets hold of it, it goes to another level.
Dana: There are also comedy sketches that are question marks up until a certain point in rehearsal. I’m thinking about the “Congress Carol” and certainly “Charlie Brown Democracy.” We were scratching our heads going, “Is this going to work?” And then, all of a sudden it blossoms and we go, “Yeah, this is going to work!”
Victoria: We tinker with the running order even in a show where we’ve agreed that the running order is the running order. It was funny to walk backstage during the summer show and watch how the running order was shifting. You have to have your head about you when you’re doing it, because a lot of crap happens backstage. You’re in the interstitials where you’ve got to get a prop or to get back into a costume. I mean, we’ve had situations where someone runs on stage for an entirely different sketch.
Paul: You’re in costume, you made your most difficult costume change and then you realize-
Victoria: … Oh, no –
Paul: … it’s not now.
Victoria: I think it would be funny to have a camera backstage with our 150 props and watching people take off their clothes and get their hair right and put on wigs. It’s really a lot.
Paul: Also, we’re proud this year to have an intergenerational show. So it really is like the King Family.
Victoria: We have a sketch where we’re all comedy writers trying to write a sketch that makes people laugh about Joe Biden because frankly, he’s just not funny. Listening to Emilia and Dana fight over the question of whether Joe Biden is funny is just really funny to me.
Dana: And then my son’s a financial analyst, so we’ve got a sketch where he just comes out and crunches some numbers.
Victoria: But then he got a backache, so he’s out.
Dana: He does have sciatica.
Victoria: Teme, put the sciatica in the article just so he feels included.
Teme: How have dynamics changed with the addition of a new generation?
Dana: Oh, it’s been fun. It’s a whole new color to play with. We’ve got a couple of things where Emilia stands up as a millennial and gets in our boomer faces.
Paul: We have at least three sketches where the fact that she’s a different generation than us really plays. I don’t want to give it away, but we weren’t able to do those things before.
Teme: Emilia, how is it for you to perform with your parents? I think it’s super cool that you have a relationship where you can do that.
Emilia: Yes, it’s very different to be super close with your parents as a millennial. The millennial experience is you move away from home and then never see your family, whereas I kind of have stuck by my family.
Victoria: Well, you moved away. You don’t live with us, although I wish you did.
Emilia: I feel really grateful to have this comedic community here that is so supportive and loving and welcoming. It’s been so much fun. These three have been doing shows for years now, and I’ve never once felt uncomfortable or like I didn’t belong there.
Victoria: For the record, I will point out that every time I give her a note, Dana corrects me and takes Emilia’s side.
Dana: What are you talking about?
Victoria: Every single time.
Dana: I am always in on the side of what makes the joke work the best. It’s nothing personal. I would think that you would know that about me after eleven shows!
Victoria: I want to add a little interjection for Emilia. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t been making comedy from the time you were six months old. We’ve always been a family of wisecrackers. Emilia has been a standup from the time she could walk.
Paul: What was her first joke, about the dinosaur? Why did the dinosaur-
Victoria: … smell?
Paul: Because he’s “ex-stinct.”
Teme: That’s a really good joke.
Victoria: She’s got something.
Emilia: I’ve always had extremely supportive parents.
BRINGING SKETCHES TO LIFE
Teme: What is the Practical Theatre Company’s creative process? How do your sketches come to life?
Dana: It’s changed. The first shows we did, we did a lot of improv. We don’t do as much improv anymore. We tend to spitball concepts and then one of us scripts a first draft, very much like a writing staff on any show. Then we read and go over it together.
Victoria: We used to record the improvisation, transcribe it and then cut it down. The couple of sketches that Paul and I will do, which are older, were all improvised at first. That was Nichols and May’s process, and so we were following it like a textbook. You may see the difference between those sketches and the sketches that are scripted.
Paul: The improvisational aspect now comes in only after we really routine these sketches and tighten them up. That way, when we’re performing them, we can give them an improvisational feel because we don’t have to be slavishly tied to the text. If there’s a mistake, sometimes that’s the most fun we have, because we can go off script and in the moment.
Victoria: The mistake is only funny if the show is so tight that the audience can enjoy it.
Dana: During a sketch [earlier this year], our smoke machine was malfunctioning, so it either didn’t turn on or it didn’t turn off. So that was just fodder for Paul and me to go off on it.
Paul: And one night I completely forgot what my next line was and I just told the audience, “I have no idea where I am.” The odd thing was that I actually had a script in my hand –
Victoria: … on a clipboard as part of the props of the show –
Paul: … and it’s supposed to be the actual script, but of course it was a different script entirely, which I let the audience know. We had a great deal of fun with that.
Sometimes we feel like, “Here’s two or three things that are in the news that we have to address.” It’s not that people expect to address them, but they’re on people’s minds so you want to get that out of the way. Then we want to make sure we balance stuff, so that it’s not all topical.
INSIDE THE WRITERS ROOM
Teme: How does your collective TV writers room experience factor into your process?
Dana: I don’t feel like I’ve ever left the writers room. Whether I was on staff or just working by myself, for forty years it’s been like every day I wake up and I’m in a writers room. Mostly what I get out of it is I am absolutely willing to let my babies go. If something needs to be cut, I have absolutely no problem cutting it no matter how invested or emotionally tied I am to something. If it ain’t working, cut it. That I learned in television early on.
Paul: Exactly.
Victoria: Although Dana has developed a very serious ulcer. He’s internalizing this.
Paul: I ran a staff for Totally Hidden Video back in the ‘90s. As the head writer, I would tell these young writers, “You can’t fight every day, every sketch. You have to yield. Somebody around this room might actually have a better idea about this thing.”
Victoria: Emilia was at the writer’s table in Veep next to the likes of Frank Rick. Was their process any different than ours?
Dana: You got paid more.
Emilia: Sure as hell did. This experience is more like when I worked on Tacoma FD. At Veep, we wrote it all together. Tacoma FD was very much the showrunners knew what every episode was going to be. They had an outline and they just wanted you to write the episode. I’ve learned that when you’re a low-level writer especially, you’re making their show. It’s not your show. You are helping them write their show. So like what they were saying, let your babies die. You’re not the boss.
Paul: The bottom line for us is do we think it’s funny? That’s always been the driving raison d’etre of the Practical Theatre Company. What is the funniest joke? Now and then we think, “Oh, have we gone too far,” or somebody is offended. Sometimes we’ll write a joke that seems perfectly fine for us. Then some younger person says, “Ohhh, I don’t know” and –
Victoria: … tries to cancel –
Paul: … and we’re like, “Oh, really? You found that offensive?”
Dana: We had a situation last year, the best joke in the show, I thought, was called into question, and I think we cut it one night and then said-
Victoria: … put it back.
Teme: I remember! The math professor, right?
Dana: Yes.
Paul: “What if one plus one identifies as three?”
Victoria: Our show doesn’t have to answer to networks. There’s something special about that. The downside is that we don’t make that network money. The good side is we get an opportunity to express our opinions and be creative about what we think is funny and invest in these characters –
Dana: … and keep the form alive.
Paul: It’s the 50th anniversary of the Mee-Ow Show coming up at Northwestern University. Dana and I did that show back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we’ve really kept that alive. The Mee-Ow Show hasn’t even really kept that alive. It’s devolved into a lot of improv games on stage, some sketches and some music. We want to combine all that as we always did.
Victoria: I mean, I’ve begun to ask myself … this is a shitload of work. It’s constant and it’s emotionally taxing, and I will keep that part of my process to myself. But I was asking myself in my sleep the other night, “Why am I doing this? I could be doing something else, like anything.” And so I do hope the audiences appreciate it and come to support it, and that it is something that is supported by the community. They are the reason we do it.
Paul: Right. And we’ve actually had that support from the community, and that’s been very nice. We have a very comfy home at Studio5, which is a beautiful place to see a show.
Victoria: We aren’t restrained from being silly and sometimes downright absurd. But we do want people to think. We want to make it witty and funny, and to have them leave with something a little bit more than just something vulgar, which is so often what we see in standup.
WHY?
Teme: What is the “why” for all of you? Why put in all this work every year at a time when most people are thinking about vacation?
Victoria: Well, for me, it’s just thrilling to hear the audience respond and to have the opportunity to do the characters and to exercise that muscle.
Dana: It’s just the most fun that I can have. I think the same is true with Paul, too. We’ve always had fun doing this and it’s a creative outlet and the older I get, this is about as hard as I want to work.
Paul: There are kids who were the wiseacre in class. They were the funny kid. They were the ones who loved comic books and loved watching the old comics on stage. That was me growing up. That was Dana growing up. No matter what I’ve done as a writer, especially in television where I’ve done a lot of documentaries and a lot of reality shows, I’ve always considered myself primarily a comedian. The funny stuff has always been the most important. At Studio5, I can actually do that with friends and family and then perform it in front of an appreciative, educated audience.
AT HOME WITH YOU
Teme: How would you describe your relationship with the audience?
Dana: I do everything that the Northwestern theater program told you not to do. I comment on the character that I’m playing. I’m Dana playing a character and I’ve always felt that’s a joke between me and the audience. I don’t get lost in the character. My thing is much closer to connecting with the audience as a comedian.
Emilia: For me, I love an audience. I’ve felt more comfortable in front of a crowd than one-on-one talking to somebody my whole life.
Paul: I feel immediately at home in front of an audience. I’ve never been worried about dealing with an audience. When our daughters were in high school, they would have us be the MC for their fundraisers. Studio5 is like our living room, and we’re having a bunch of people over to our house. So it’s just a very warm and supportive feeling.
Victoria: For me, I just love the people who come in the door because I love people who love comedy. I love comedy, and I want everyone to have a great time. I feel a little bit like a hostess and it’s a party, and we’re going to be a little bit bad, but we’re going to try not to step over the line too much.
Teme: Which characters in this upcoming Revue most resonate with you? Or in your past Revues?
Dana: Probably my favorite one of the last couple of years is the studio executive in “Shakespeare.” Because I’m shitting all over your pitch and putting in my ideas, which is my life for thirty years.
Victoria: That’s genuine! For me it’s this Revue’s character in “Milk.”
Emilia: I was going to say “French Bread” [in this Revue] because it’s a mother-daughter sketch and it’s based on real life.
Paul: Well, for me it’s playing Zeus. It gives me an opportunity to be really loud. The more commitment you can bring to an absurd premise and an absurd character, it allows me to get absolutely –
Victoria: … shameless.
Paul: … no, connected. And to literally let my hair down and that’s a lot of fun. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to bring him back this year and put Zeus in a new situation.
Dana: Paul always needs space to get loud. There have been many, many times where we’ve been running through some sketch at my house and I have to go, “Paul! The neighbors!”
Victoria: That’s what works – that we’re all so different.
Paul: We’ll keep them awake in the second act, that’s for sure. In the [Zeus and Hera sketch] we’re like the Olympian “Honeymooners.”
Dana: Hello, Zeusy Boy.
Teme: What do you hope audiences will take away?
Paul: The feeling that it was a lot of fun, and “we took the time to come here and we were rewarded with a good time.” I don’t want to give things away, but I think the audience will come away with a warm spot in their heart because the show gets a little bit nostalgic. The holiday specials in the ‘70s had a huge national audience, but at the end you always felt like they were talking just to you. They would wrap this up in a warm way and we’ll be doing that too.
Victoria: There’s a sense that none of us know when our time here will be up and that it is a blessing to share this with you. We want to open our arms and our hearts. I don’t want to get too sappy, but that’s what it’s about.
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The Practical Theatre’s HO-HO-HOLIDAY REVUE is at Studio5, 1934 Dempster Street, Evanston
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
Thursday, December 28: 7:30 p.m. Special preview with audience feedback
Friday, December 29: 7:30 p.m. Special preview with audience feedback
Saturday, December 30: 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, December 31: 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, January 4: 7:30 p.m.
Friday, January 5: 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, January 6: 8:00 p.m.
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For more about the Practical Theatre Company, visit Paul’s blog
More interviews with the Practical Theatre Company:
Post-Pandemic Revue 2022: A Q&A with Vic & Paul
Post-Pandemic Revue 2022: A Q&A with Dana
The Time for the Post-Pandemic Revue is Now: A Q&A with Vic & Paul (2021)
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