Second City comedy show picks more peaches than pit

The Alliance Theatre’s comedy revue The Second City: Peach Drop, Stop and Roll features three Atlanta actors and three out-of-towners. That’s up from two locals in last year’s Second City show at the Alliance’s Hertz Stage, The City Too Busy to Hate, Too Hard to Commute. At this rate, the Atlanta-themed show may have an all-Atlanta cast by 2012.

Like its predecessor, written by Ed Furman and T.J. Shanoff, Peach Drop combines Atlanta-centric sketches peppered with time-tested material from the famed Chicago-based improv comedy playhouse. Two Chicagoans, Seth Weitberg and director Matt Hovde, wrote Peach Drop and, impressively, avoid the temptation to recycle any of the better gags from last year. Occasionally, Peach Drop gets gridlocked in lame jokes about Atlanta media figures and predictable stereotypes, but the laughs pick up speed in the second act.

As the title suggests, Peach Drop begins on New Year’s Eve in Underground Atlanta, and generally features more holiday-themed sketches than last year. At worst, Peach Drop resorts to Capitol-steps-style namedropping based on current events and local celebrities, such as thinly conceived parodies of Jane Fonda (Amber Nash) or Dagmar Midcap (Amy Roeder). When Peach Drop tries too hard to be timely, like its reverence to the alien lady from the “V” TV series, the spectators shrug. Other times, however, the show hits the sweet spot of fresh, silly public obsessions, as with its musical number about “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.”

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(Photo by Greg Mooney)