Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies Second City
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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.
But there’s no relaxing into deja vu here. Director Matt Hovde tries hard to fend it off with all kinds of ostentatious gestures. Flourishes of aggressively loud technoesque music divide the sketches, and Amy Jackson’s strange non sequitur of a backdrop—all shiny surfaces and hard edges—creates the sense that Spoiler Alert is unfolding inside a gumball machine designed by Helmut Jahn.
A recent New Yorker profile on Second City veteran Steve Carell quotes a fellow vet, movie director Adam McKay, as saying that Carell “understands how to push his old-fashioned skills so they seem edgy.” Hovde seems to be taking a similar tack by piling the gimmicks on Spoiler Alert. In the end, though, it’s the skills that save him from himself and render yet another Second City revue foolproof.