Not Ready for Prime Time – 17 October 2025

A spunky, unauthorized play about the origins of Saturday Night Live, Not Ready for Prime Time takes a behind-the-scenes look at the cast and crew member relationships behind the sketches we all came to know and love. In the process, it highlights how female contributors were sometimes shut down, and the difficult position Garret Morris (Jared Grimes) was put in as the token African American writer and cast member. The SNL process has always been portrayed as somewhat chaotic, particularly for the writers, and Not Ready for Prime Time shared that frenzy, frenetic feeling. Though the passage of time was difficult to follow and understand, the story was an authentic love letter to the wild comedy giants who kicked off a cultural phenomenon that is now in its 51^st season. Complete with an incredible live band, Not Ready for Prime Time starts at the inception and carries through SNL’s next several years.

The competent cast of characters found themselves at odds with rather weak writing. From moment to moment, there was no indication of how much time was passing. Characters would often say things indicating that they were going to start the show or introduce a host, but then the next moment would be about something else entirely. For example, there was a pivotal moment for Garret Morris when Lorne Michaels (Ian Bouillion) told Garret that Richard Pryor was refusing to perform on stage with him. Then we were abruptly somewhere else, and though this was the beginning of a recurring subplot regarding Garret’s mental health, there was absolutely no transition or indication that we were moving forward in time and in a completely different moment from the second Garret exited. The script was full of bright big ideas, but it lacked focus. Despite the confusing shifts in time, the story was easy to follow in terms of who dominated the show, whose love stories were falling apart, whose medical diagnoses derailed their lives, how cast members came on and off of the show, and the producer’s struggles with keeping the show running. It would have been helpful to have a projection or a sign run across the stage indicating when we were skipping forward in time. There are a lot of easy remedies for this that wouldn’t require script adjustments.

 Not Ready for Prime Time simultaneously took on too much and too little to fill its two and a half hour run time. The entire show felt like a whirlwind marathon, yet because so many things were mentioned in passing and not fleshed out, the audience didn’t always know what to feel invested in and what was just a moment. The unevenness made it hard to latch on to any one plot point or idea, so at times the show dragged because of too many things passing by too quickly. This made the show feel too long. If every idea dropped into this production were to become a fully realized plot point, it would need to be considerably longer. I sympathize with the struggle to paint an accurate picture of so many people, so many relationship dynamics, and so many groundbreaking ideas in so little time. I think in the case of Not Ready for Prime Time less would have been more. This is exemplified nowhere better than the intensely chaotic scenic design (Christopher Swader, Justin Swader)  and over enthusiastic lighting (Mextly Couzin) shifts—both trying to do everything and be everywhere.

Not Ready for Prime Time is a highly energized performance filled with enthusiasm and love for its source material. In its current form it hasn’t realized its full potential; with some adjustments I do think it could be ready for prime time.

I attended this performance on a press pass from JT Public Relations.