Right now in Chicago there are about 1,200 aspiring improvisers enrolled at the Second City Training Center, 600 at ImprovOlympic, and 100 at Annoyance Productions. Add them to the legions that’ve already graduated from these programs and you’ve got some 5,000 improvisers in the city, many of whom have come here specifically to study and perform. All of them want what Dan Bakkedahl had.
“There were all sorts of fantastic reasons to stay,” he says. But “the only one that really matters–my heart–wouldn’t let me. And it’s my heart that lets me do any show that I do. It’s my heart with which I improvise.”
Stroth’s first choice was Karen Graci (who went on to perform with ImprovOlympic’s featured group Baby Wants Candy and tour with Second City), and when she declined he asked Bakkedahl, impressed by his ability to absorb what he was teaching and play convincing characters onstage. It’s something Bakkedahl’s known for even now. “He believes so much in what he’s doing,” says Jean Villepique, his former castmate on the Second City mainstage. “He’s not even ‘acting’ acting–he’s just believing.”
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Bakkedahl auditioned for the Second City touring company early in 2000. In March, almost a year after Zumpf! began, he got a call asking if he could fill in for company member Greg Mills, who’d booked a TV commercial the same weekend he was scheduled to tour. Second City had informed Mills that if he accepted the gig he wouldn’t be returning to the touring company, but he’d taken it anyway–the money was too good to pass up. Bakkedahl filled in for him and a couple days later was offered a permanent position. “I was like, Yes! Yes! Yes!” he says. “But there was a part of me that felt like, Mills lost his job because of that?”
Two years later Bakkedahl no longer thought he would be promoted. He’d recently confronted Second City vice president Kelly Leonard after Leonard trashed a show, shouting at him not to speak to actors that harshly. Leonard called each member of the troupe and apologized. But Bakkedahl had had enough. In August 2002 he quit.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t say no. He joined the mainstage troupe in August and began working on a new show in September. But he quickly began to feel that the producers over-steered the production, underutilizing the performers’ individual strengths and stripping them of their integrity. Saturday Night Live and Mad TV have a similar problem, he says: “Both of those shows have incredibly talented people, but the producers are getting in the way. They think they know how to do it, and they don’t realize that they’ve hired a bunch of experts in the field.” Still, Doors Open on the Right opened in December 2003 to good reviews.
