From The Comic's Comic

I totally forgot to ask him about working with Michael Jordan!

Michael Hartney is an actor, writer and comedian who was the final artistic director for the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre when it shuttered its New York City operations in 2020, and one of the founding members of the nonprofit Squirrel Comedy Theatre. Hartney created the roles of Stanley and Mr. Williams in the original Broadway cast of School of Rock the Musical, and on TV, he has appeared on 30 Rock, The Politician, The Break with Michelle Wolf, and Throwing Shade, where he also served as a staff writer. He has been a Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a New Face at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, and he can be seen every Wednesday night hosting Characters Welcome, a streaming character comedy show. Hartney joined me over Zoom to talk about how he has navigated through the end of the UCB in NYC to the launch of the Squirrel Comedy Theatre, and everything in between.

I met Hartney back in about 2009, when he was a member of the UCB sketch group High Treason along with a then-unknown Kate McKinnon. I wrote up Hartney’s solo UCB show, So I Like Superman, A One-Man Nerd Show, in 2010. And sometimes I’d see him on the elevated trains above Astoria as we both were heading into Manhattan or heading back to our respective homes. But I hadn’t really talked to him about the job he had when the pandemic locked down America in March 2020, when he was the artistic director at the embattled and soon-to-be shuttered UCB Theatres in New York City. Nor had I talked to him yet about what he’s up to now, as a founding member of the Squirrel Comedy Theatre. So it was great to catch up with him.

Even if I totally forgot he was in a national Hanes TV ad with Michael Jordan to ask him about that experience! Sorry. My bad.

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Here’s a slightly condensed and edited transcript from our podcast chat!

Sean L. McCarthy: So last things first. It has been more than a decade since I reviewed your one-man show, So I Like Superman. So, how has the last decade been for a Superman fan?

Michael Hartney: Wow! You know what? It’s really had its ups and downs, Sean. There have been good comic books. There have been bad comic books. There have been terrible movies. There’s been a good TV show. Yeah, it’s been all over the map.

Me: How do you feel about Superman currently? I mean, I could’ve led with what was it like to crash the UCB?

Hartney: Yeah, it could have been something like that, but I’d much rather talk about Superman than UCB, to be honest. Right now, his son has taken over as Superman. And his secret has been revealed to the world, so there’s no like Clark Kent/Superman thing happening, and like, that’s just not my shit.

Me: I know as a newspaper reporter myself, I do not condone this erasure of Clark Kent.

Hartney: I mean, I guess he still exists, and he’s is like, writing for The Daily Planet still, but like everyone knows he’s Superman and it’s just weird, like, just give me what I like. I’m old.

Me: Well, you were so young when I first met you at the UCB Theatre.

Hartney: Too true, too true, just a fresh-faced little fawn.

Me: Yeah, back when it was just under the basement of Gristedes and not bleeding money everywhere.

Hartney: Yeah, that was fun then. Remember then?

Me: I want to talk to you a whole lot about the Squirrel Theatre. But to get to the Squirrel Theatre, you have to come out of the UCB, and it blew my mind when I went back to look this up, like I remember seeing you as a part of the Maude sketch team High Treason, which included a then-unknown Kate McKinnon.

Hartney: If you weren’t one of the dozens of people who watched The Big Gay Sketch Show, you did not know who Kate McKinnon was. She was already on that show when she was on Maude Night.

Me: Yeah, I had no idea about The Big Gay Sketch Show. I didn’t even know. I might have known LOGO was a cable TV channel, but not really.

Hartney: Yeah, that’s, I mean that persists to this day. No one’s really sure if LOGO is a channel still.

Me: Well, so many cable channels have come and gone and rebranded so it might be something else, which it probably isn’t. It’s probably still there, and I just don’t recognize it.

Hartney: I think it still exists and, I was literally employed by LOGO for two years. I should know the answer, and I very much don’t.

Me: But it seems like looking back on your experience with High Treason, like also ironically is like high treason, because one of the writers for that team was Aaron Glaser.

Hartney: OH MY GOD! We’re really going for it, Sean, aren’t we?!

Me: AKA the man who may or may not have accelerated the financial bankruptcy of the UCB.

Hartney: You know I can’t confirm or deny that.

Me: I only say that because I had Matt Besser on the podcast (in October 2019, Episode #278). I interviewed him in person at the Sunset theater when that was still a thing. And when I talked to him, after we turn the microphones off, the lawsuit was still ongoing, so I got the impression that they were bleeding a lot of money on that.

Hartney: Well, I do think it’s was very expensive and it is one of the expenses that did not find its way into the information I had. So, could be?

Me: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now is because, you know, you not only survived the end of the UCB but you’re like, building back better, to borrow a term from the current president, by joining together with some other improvisers and sketch players in forming this new nonprofit called the Squirrel Theatre, so tell me, how did you how did you and the other squirrels rally.

Hartney: So, you know, when everything closed. I knew that UCB had no intention of returning to New York. I think there was probably some desire to license the name, and do UCB shows in New York with them not on the hook financially in any way. And for, I don’t know, a couple months, that seemed like maybe that was a feasible thing. I guess it’s still feasible. Someone could do that. That could still happen. But once the news in June (2020) came out that they took six figures worth of PPP loan money out on the New York company, which I knew full well they had no intention of reopening. That’s when I was like OK, well, we’re on our own. And we’ve got to fill this void somehow. So I emailed Corin Wells, and we said started chit-chatting and eventually started chit-chatting with Lou Gonzalez and Patrick Keene, and Maritza Montañez, and Alex Song-Xia And so the six of us met every week for months and months and months, trying to figure out what the hell, how the hell to do this, and what to keep from the old way and what to throw away, and how to change those things.

Me: So what did you decide ultimately?

Hartney: Well, I mean, first we went with nonprofit. That way that we could be financially transparent. There’s no mystery about where any of the money went because it’s literally the law, that it’s public knowledge. I think being founded by a group that is majority queer, majority people of color, I think, is a step in the right direction. I just think like, our tastes and sensibilities are just going to lend themselves to programming and classes that are more representative. Those are two of the big problems.

Me: Right. One of the knocks on, I guess, not just the UCB, but also other New York or even Chicago and LA improv and sketch schools, was that the barrier to entry was so high that it sort of weeded out a lot of people. Who weren’t already privileged enough to spend the money.

Hartney: And that’s not the case here. So if you, you know, took a couple of Second City classes, you don’t have to start over with Squirrel. If you’re like, I’m ready for improv three, or I’m ready for this advanced form class, then go ahead and take the class. You know there’s no barrier to entry to our stage. Our pitch form is on our website, literally anyone can pitch me a show. You don’t have to come from Squirrel, dropped $1000s of dollars on classes with us. So that’s another big thing that we’re trying to change is just making it more accessible to more people.

Me: Where are you at in terms of having a physical space? I know the pandemic is changing the factors from week to week.

Hartney: We have a three-night residency at Caveat, so this is the physical space we’re in at the moment. We’ve got a lot of funds, still to raise, to be able to really, you know, deal with the albatross that is a New York lease. It’s just not only going to require a lot of overhead with rent, and insurance but also staffing. It’s a tremendous undertaking, so we’re in the process of strategizing how we’re going to fund.

Me: Now I don’t want to assume too much, but I assume that when you first started performing and taking classes at the UCB yourself, you probably didn’t imagine you would have to think about any of these questions?

Hartney: No. And it’s actually a super bummer that I have to.

Me: What was your, what was your plan when I first saw you as a as a wee-little High Treason, Superman-loving lad?

Hartney: Oh, you know, I wanted to do my dumb characters, and sign with a big agent or manager, and get on SNL and, you know, be in movies now or like have wrapped season four of my FX show.

Me: Those things haven’t happened but you’ve been on Broadway for years. You were in the Broadway hit musical School of Rock.

Hartney: Yeah, pretty cool.

Me: Where you were, you were not only onstage just about every night, but some nights you got to be the main character, right? You were the understudy for Dewey, the lead.

Hartney: Exactly two nights, and by nights I mean, Sunday early afternoons. I did go on twice. It was the craziest time of my life. But yeah, I was on every night. I played like four characters in the ensemble.

Me: Wait, but OK. So even though it’s, I think it’s even more impressive slash fascinating. Are you familiar with the movie Field of Dreams? OK, so it seems like a kind of a Moonlight Graham situation, where you’re in the show and you got called up and you get this like two times but on a Sunday early matinee. What, so what was it like to be the lead in a Broadway musical, and just have it be a fleeting experience?

Hartney: Yeah it was kind of a slow-going source of tremendous anxiety for almost a year, because I knew that I had gotten hired to cover Dewey. Like before the show started getting workshopped, and when it was cast, they had no idea how extensive the guitar part that Dewey had to play would be. And I was very upfront at the beginning that I had never seen a guitar, let alone, played one.

Me: OK, that can be a hurdle.

Hartney: So they put me in guitar lessons, and it just became clear very quickly that I have no aptitude for that instrument. And, you know, some people take to things more easily, like I do take to some things easily. Guitar just was not one of them. And, you know, the assistant director at some point, came up to me after what one Dewey rehearsal and said, ‘So you know what is holding you back, right?’ The damn thing with the six strings? Yeah! But I just kept plugging away at it, and there was no like, OK, you’re ready. There was no conversation like that. It was just a phone call from the stage manager. No, a text! From the stage manager one day while I was in a tech rehearsal at UCB Chelsea. Below Gristedes. It just said you’re going on as Dewey this Sunday. OK, here it is baby! And that first show I was so focused on getting the guitar right, that I wasn’t really thinking about other things, which ended up being fine. I had some big vocal problems in that first one. But the guitar, I smoked it! And then my guitar teacher surprised me by being there, so it’s like yes, I played guitar well in front of my guitar teacher on Broadway.

Me: What about the second time?

Hartney: Second time? I fixed the vocal problems. Guitar? A little less good, and they changed one of the guitar parts between jobs. Dewey use to play like the opening riff of Satisfaction. And then I guess, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Mick Jagger just could not come to an agreement on that, and so it changed to an Andrew Lloyd Webber original riff, which I totally fucked up the first note of, but it was fine.

Me: Yeah, but nobody would know what that is.

Hartney: Yeah, exactly.

Me: Well, that also kind of coincides with, I didn’t realize this until I looked it up, but in my records on my website, both in 2018, while you were doing Broadway. 2018: That was the year that you had New Faces at Just For Laughs, and it was also a year where you were selected in this very competitive, NBC Late-Night Writers Workshop.

Hartney: Yes, it only took me already having worked as a staff writer in late-night television to get that workshop. So that was cool.

Me: But that’s kind of a testament to the state of late-night television, at least in 2018. Yeah, that it was so exclusive that you can be already have a late-night TV credit and still be like, I have to go to this workshop?

Hartney: I have to go to this workshop, I truly was like, I can’t believe I’m going to do this but I think I’m going to apply to this workshop?

Me: How beneficial was it?

Hartney: Oh, you know, I met cool people for sure, and like the NBC program that does Late Night Writers Workshop and Writers On The Verge and all that stuff, all those people are great and you know, I’ve definitely gotten to submit for other things, with or without reps. So it’s been a great resource,

Me: I guess that’s like the question that most outsiders have is like, well how do I get in the door? Do I be an intern for, I guess, you know there’s a lot of people who 20 years ago were an intern for Conan, are they interned at SNL and then OK, now I’m in the door. Now they know my face and now I can get something.

Hartney: Yeah, I’m still waiting for the thing.

Me: But I probably suppose a lot of people thought this Late-Night Writer’s Workshop was the kind of thing that might be like a pipeline to, oh, now they’re going to get me in the system and I’m going to become part of NBC now.

Hartney: A bunch of writers from my year have staffed on really cool shows. So, you know, I’ll get staffed on a show again someday.

Me: Well, I guess that’s the question. I asked you when you started, what did you want to do, and you said you wanted to be on SNL. How has what you want changed as you’ve gotten older and you’ve had a lot of experience with the system and with other performers and writers and…

Hartney: Well, as I’ve found that football is a pretty unlikely Herculean task. I had to ask myself, what about you I won. And it’s, you know, getting there, do sketch comedy and play characters on television. So, that’s still what I want to do, do sketch comedy characters and television changed. This is probably not going to be.

Me: No, it might be more things like your New York Times opinion guy.

Hartney: I starred in a sketch on television! I mean, that’s the dream, like I did that. It happened.

Me: That might have been my favorite thing from Netflix’s The Break with Michelle Wolf, your role as The New York Times curator of the opinions pages.

Hartney: That’s Ryan Perez writing, which was extraordinary.

Me: What is the difference for you in terms of like getting a role like that, where you just come in and you shoot for probably one day on something like that versus like getting a role on a sitcom that might be in the background but if you play your cards right, your one line can turn into a recurring thing?

Here’s Hartney in a scene from NBC’s 30 Rock.

Hartney: Once anything like that happens to me on a sitcom, I feel like I’ll be able to talk about it. Like the last thing I did shoot was an episode of The Politician, where I was supposed to have, like, kind of a part, like a little bit of a little juicy catty chat with them that there’s character. And then I booked. Got the script, and my character had been whittled down to exactly one line, because my whole journey, the whole point of my character was to set up Bette Midler so she can do a duet with Ben Platt, which did not happen. So then, there was no need for me to say anything but don’t think, and watch the episode. And for my life. It’s like a wide shot of my back to the camera. Oh yeah, this is the one for the reel.

Me: But you still get to be on set with Bette Midler.

Hartney: So I got to be on set with Bette Midler, and Judith Light, and watch them act. Truly, all day long, and it was crazy.

Me: What do you get from, or what do you try to get from an experience like that other than like just being in awe?

Hartney: Well, I think, you know especially us like live improv and sketch people, we don’t always have a ton of experience with a camera four inches from your face, doing pretty naturalistic acting. But keeping it alive and buoyant and watching those two do that over and over again, hitting their marks perfectly every time, but every time also, giving it a little something different. It was just fascinating.

Me: One of the things that you’ve been able to maintain slash carryover from UCB is your signature showcase, Characters Welcome. Tell me about how you started doing that in the first place.

Hartney: So me and Justin Tyler like doing characters, and I think, you know Justin was I think a little more entrenched in UCB stuff at the time than me, and had just done like a MADtv showcase. Like, (Jon) Gabrus did it. Like a bunch of people did it, and because there was no character thing going on at the time, once they found out they had the showcase, they had like three days to just write as much bullshit as they could and so I think we need to be a little more prepared when these things come along. So Justin and I started a weekly workshop where anybody who wanted to come in and have a piece of whatever shape it was, and get feedback. And we were like, we should try to see if we can go show this and so we emailed Nate Dern, who was the artistic director at the time and you see me thinking, maybe he’ll give us a slot at night on a Tuesday at the Beast (UCB East), like who knows, and he was like oh sure how does Saturday 7:30 p.m. sound? okay yeah cool, all right. So yeah, our first show was in late December of 2012. Our special guest was Kate McKinnon. And so yeah, we’ve been doing this show for almost nine years. Briefly, it was a House team at the UCB theatre, and it became a house team in LA. We’ve done web series, our YouTube channel kind of blew up in the past like year or so, so, yeah, we’ve got a bit of a following.

(Characters Welcome on YouTube, currently 141,000 subscribers as of this writing)

Me: Well and you did that, like that was right around the same time that Just For Laughs even thought of doing their own Characters thing with New Faces.

Hartney: I suppose that is true. I think, Griffin Newman would’ve just done it, maybe like the second year, or something

Me: They started in 2011.

Hartney: So then I think Griffin did the one in 2012, pretty quickly after that was like, ‘Hey, can I start coming to this workshop? I just did this Just for Laughs New Faces Characters.’ Of course, yes Griffin, you can come in and do some characters.

Me: One of the reasons Just For Laughs started doing adding the Characters showcases. I know they did it because they wanted to create more buzz for New Faces, and decided to do their own sort of SNL audition. But by doing that it kind of pulls back the curtain for all of us who, who think SNL is just as big black box of a mystery, and go, oh, this is what it must be like to do an audition for SNL.

Hartney: I think people find their way to that show (SNL) in a bunch of different ways. Like some people do zero characters and just do a stand-up set, but for the people who fell in love with that show because of people like Phil Hartman, people who could disappear into a bunch of different characters, that’s certainly one way to arrive on the show, and that’s kind of what we’ve been working on, what we’ve been teaching.

Me: When you’re developing characters for yourself, how often are you just like doing it to see what you can pull off? And how often are you doing it with the intention slash hopes that you’ll stumble onto something that’ll be a character you can perform for years?

Hartney: Now that’s interesting, because we’ve returned to doing a live streaming show every week, I’ve had to write an incredible material, because I try not to repeat those same characters. And so, I don’t think I work on any of these things with any intention, other than I’ve got to have something to perform on Wednesday. So, usually that has been some sort of petty grievance that I’ve turned into a character, you know, anti-maskers and people who say our people don’t want to work anymore, and you know gay guys on my feed who were like, I can’t believe people aren’t following protocols, and they say that in a busy tapas restaurant, that kind of stuff. I just, I don’t know. All we’ve been doing is kind of observing the world through the internet. That’s probably most of the inspiration I’ve been using. But I didn’t say any of them, I’m like, this is the one I’m gonna build a solo show around. People flock from everywhere. It sounds lofty. Maybe I should try something,

Me: You should! So what, what was it like being the artistic director for the UCB Theatre?

Hartney: For the first three months it was pretty fun. This wasn’t the job I wanted. I just needed a job and that job became available.

Me: You replaced Shannon O’Neill, right? So did she, like, tap you on the shoulders and say hey, I’m done.

Hartney: Oh, no. No no, no I didn’t talk to her about it. I think Matt Rogers texted me, End of an era!, or something like that. I was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Then I saw the email and I was like, oh, I should apply to this, and he was like, they don’t need a job. So, I mean, I truly applied because I like health insurance, and I knew I’d be good at it. So the first few months were pretty fun. I got to put together a lot of teams, which like sketch comedy is my favorite thing. So getting to watch a bunch of character auditions and read a bunch of comedy sketches, like to some people that probably sounds like a nightmare, but to me: Super, super fun. And then we missed payroll twice. I was like, well, what the fuck have I gotten myself into? Then I had to tell everyone that we were having massive financial problems and pretend like we weren’t going to leave the Beast when I knew full well we were going to leave the Beast, which by the way was an absolutely bad, dumb move. Very fully idiotic. Begged them to not do it. So that’s when it just became this like, you know, embattled artistic director Michael Hartney. I think the big narrative is that like nobody liked Hell’s Kitchen and no one came to Hell’s Kitchen and the reality is a lot of people liked Hell’s Kitchen and tons of people came out to Hell’s Kitchen. There were lines down 42nd Street, the way there were lines down 26th Street.

Me: I didn’t go there as often, but every time I went it was packed. But just in terms of shifting from being a performer to being a programmer, like that’s a whole, like he mentioned being able to watch auditions and put together teams, but then there was also like figuring out the rest of the schedule, right?

Hartney: This is a big job, momma.

Me: Did you have any big goals in terms of like, OK, I know that UCB has been this way. Well, now that I am in charge, it’s going to be this way? Or did you just think about what was the stuff you liked and wanted to see?

Hartney: I don’t think it was necessarily what I liked and wanted to see so much as it was, what are the cool things that communities do that I can put up? I mean, I don’t think any of my predecessors would say like, ‘Oh, I was not into diversity.’ We tried to expand how much representation was on our teams in our shows, you know, like, there’s those identity-based shows, I think, for example, and we did a bunch more of them when I was Monday nights, because we were suddenly in this like big theater in the theater district, I tried to tailor more towards how Broadway is dark that night, so come see us do this stuff instead. So Monday nights picked up in a completely different way.

Me: Right, I definitely remember writing about and seeing some shows in Hell’s Kitchen that were definitely like kind of Broadway like in terms of like being musical theater.

Hartney: There was Rumpleteaser, the musical improv group. And Shiz, which is like a sketch show that uses showtunes.

Me: So now that you have that experience behind you, what is your, I mean, as I mentioned before, if you’re listening to this, in August or September of 2021, you’re obviously well aware painfully of where we are in the pandemic, but if you’re listening to this later: Who knows what might it be like, and when theaters will be back open, and when it’ll be easier to find a space and all of that stuff, what do you what do you hope to see out of just not just Squirrel but, but the improv comedy scene in New York City and beyond, when we do come back?

Hartney: I want The Squirrel to have a space. I want sold-out shows, people excited. I want that for Magnet. I want that for The PIT. I want that for everybody. I want people to be as excited about improv and sketch as they were in like the mid aughts. I think it’s been a while since anyone has been that excited about improv and sketch, and that’s fine. You know everything’s cyclical, but I hope, I hope it’s just going to thrive, and I think having people, you know, audiences who can come to a theater and see themselves on stage in some way. I mean that’s what we’re really after. And hopefully, we’re gonna just keep doing it.

Me: Well I know you get to improvise this weekend with the new and improved RaaaatScraps and all these other shows so.

Hartney: Borabish! Every Saturday night at 7:30. That’s the founders, that’s the school founders.

Me: That’s you and Corin and the other Squirrels. Do you call yourself Squirrels or what do you call yourselves? I don’t want to like haphazardly ascribe a nickname for your team.

Hartney: The name of our weekly Zoom meeting is Squirrel6. I guess we’re the Squirrel6.

Me: Okay, right, take that UCB4. We’ve now got the Squirrel6.