CHICAGO — Chicago’s Second City, the venerable comedy theater headquartered in Old Town, has a new CEO: Ed Wells, most recently executive vice president and global head of media and education for the Sesame Workshop, the producers of “Sesame Street,” formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop.
“I’m a big fan of the institution,” Wells, 49, said of Second City in a telephone interview Monday. “I want to continue scaling the business and see how we can honor the brand.”
Wells also said that he plans to expand the Second City into markets beyond the longtime mainstays of Chicago and Toronto. That would not be a new endeavor — at various points in its 63-year history, Second City has had outposts in downtown Detroit (Wells’ hometown), Los Angeles, Las Vegas, on cruise ships and in suburban Hoffman Estates. But Wells described his new employer, now owned by Strauss Zelnick’s ZMC, a New York-based private equity firm, as “the world leader in improv-based education and entertainment” that befits a national roll-out of its brand.
