'Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies' at Second City: Spoiler alert, read this review to start the show
THEATER REVIEW: "Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies" ★★½ Open run at The Second City, 1616 N. Wells St.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $22-$27 at 312-337-3992 and www.secondcity.com. With Shelly Gossman and Tim Robinson.
At the top of the latest Second City show, a little cart is pushed out by an unseen hand. It contains a big red button. “Press here,” says a printed sign, “to start the show.”
What comes next feels as much like a psych experiment as the top of a comedy show. Silent suburbanites. Immobile tourists. Nervous laughter from conventioneers. Murmurs of “Come on, Brian,” and the like. And eventually, the courage dispensed by the likes of Mr. Sam Adams and Miss Stella Artois prevails and someone climbs the stage and presses the button. It is a killer opener — at once retro, Pythonesque and refreshingly different. One wonders how long some future audiences will sit there. I bet they're taking notes backstage.
I feel some protection in totally spoiling that opening moment for you because this is a review of revue called “Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies.” (And, hey, spoiler alert, everyone does die). The knock-out beginning is also emblematic of a show that offers plenty of laughs but ultimately is better in the flashier, conceptual moments and weaker in what you might call the primal guts of sketch comedy — observing human behavior, probing truths, driving forward and, perhaps most important of all, knowing when you've arrived.
The latest mainstage show at Second City has the unenviable task of competing with Second City's own show down the hall — the brilliant e.t.c. revue “The Absolute Best Friggin' Time of Your Life,” which comes laudably close to living up to its billing. “Spoiler Alert,” which still needs a good edit and clarification, could take some lessons from the second stage when it comes to the delivery of relentless but credible comedic incision.
There is certainly some talent in the mainstage cast and some savvy material. The best sketch of the night is set at the Taste of Chicago and is merely a conversation between a Gahannan restaurateur (hilariously played by Sam Richardson) and his neighbor in the next booth, a sardonic Polish dispenser of atrophied perogis (played — the character, not the perogis — with resonance by Allison Bills). Emily Wilson can both be dynamic and, where necessary, very vulnerable. She's at her best in a sketch where she gets called into her boss' office and anticipates the worst. “Are there going to be layoffs?” she asks nervously. “No,” comes the reply, “layoff.” When it's you, it doesn't really matter, does it?
These are, of course, still nervous times and the show also contains a very funny and timely piece wherein a loan officer (played by Shelly Gossman) tries to do her job while conforming to the new governmental rules that she not lie to her clients about their ability to pay back the loan. The takeaway is that the whole system is actually built on lies — and nobody needs them more than the people they are supposedly designed to protect.
No wonder we all watch reality TV, where, the cast sings, “all of your misery hides what's wrong with me.”
The first act, though, gets bogged down in sketches that go on too long and that seem ill-focused. There's an ambitious piece involving Gossman and Timothy Edward Mason that wants to connect the bankruptcy of the Tribune, the Iraq War and what constitutes doing good, but it meanders and withers. And although Tim Robinson is perhaps the funniest physical comedian in this cast, he has a habit of disappearing too much inside himself and failing to deliver those all-important killer punches. He needs to look out more and fix that. He's a funny guy.
On opening night, a long, long piece that required audience members to take the stage and take part in a play written by Robinson crashed and burned, although that was at least partly due to the group of stiffs that Robinson had the misfortune to pick.
You'll get your laughs in plenty of spots. Still, the show is a bit of a strange blend of confident, whip-fast transitions and slow and often uncertain content in the middle. Now that the frame is so vividly in place on one of the coolest-ever sets on Wells Street, the cast might focus on the nuts-and-bolts stuff in the middle.
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