Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies at Second City

Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended

"...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."

Chicago Sun Times - Recommended

"...Perhaps the strongest element in this revue is the ensemble's use of movement, particularly as the actors play office furniture and equipment as well as employees. The office also serves as the ideal backdrop for riffs on unemployment, the terror of losing one's job and the responses of the "unfired" to a fellow employee (Emily Wilson) who has just gotten the bad news. We are definitely in a world where you had better think twice about ever acquiring the American dream. No loans are available."

Chicago Reader - Recommended

"...Spoiler Alert isn't one of those holy-shit epoch-making Second City shows everybody hopes for. It's modest, amiable, and resolutely conventional at heart. Even, perhaps in unconscious homage to the company's 50th anniversary, a little retro. The sketches—22 of them, which in itself is about average—hit all the familiar tropes, topics, formats, and tonalities. A teenager has to deal with embarrassing parents. A groom gets cold feet just before the wedding ceremony. There's one requisite bit in which two souls who seem to have nothing in common discover a warm rapport, and another about a sweet old lady whose solution to a squirrel infestation is amusingly out of character. Funny songs get sung, a couple gags get turned into motifs through repetition, the audience participates at the prescribed moments, and the quota of Chicago references is met. Standard stuff."

Chicago Stage and Screen - Recommended

"...The joke here is that the “spoiler alert” doesn’t refer to a movie synopsis. It’s for life itself; hence the subtitle “Everybody Dies.” Not an amusing concept upon which to build comedy, you’d think. But Matt Hovde directs the sextet in a whirlwind of satire, domestic and political, that tries to tie together the stupidities, acknowledged or unconscious, that define modern life. Mostly it succeeds."

Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...For over 50 years, Second City has made people laugh. When entering any of the theaters that this company works in, we leave our social problems, work problems and even family problems at the doorstep. With the help of these brilliant comics, we get to look at problems very close to ours but in a comical nature. No matter what is hurting us, or those sitting around us, we will leave the theater with a smile on our face and a good feeling in our hearts–and after all, isn’t that what we need during these hard times!"