Opening a satirical comedy show just a matter of days before a presidential election is a tricky assignment, especially with a contest as tense and fraught as this one and given the need for the show still to feel timely months from now.
But that’s what Second City decided to do with its new e.t.c revue, “Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone,” a show with a theme of spilling personal secrets and a kind of Houdini-esque aesthetic nodding to the worlds of magic and silent movies. It’s a skillfully hedged show, ready to be either a celebration of Kamala Harris’s victory or a portrait of the ongoing anti-Donald Trump resistance. If you want to go soon, I’d pick a show next week and see how it feels.
Even on a tense pre-election night, “Best Kept Secret” is a fun evening with a talented and freshened crew of writer-performers. I especially enjoyed the laughs at the expense of cruise lovers (“This is not a Carnival Cruise, it’s a classy cruise,” says a woman. “There is no such thing as a classy cruise,” says her sister), meat-flavored laundry detergent (“Nobody wants it. Not even in the Midwest?”) and, courtesy of the highly skilled Canadian newcomer Janelle Cheyne, a way of revealing an American in a crowded room.
“If you’ve ever seen a gun, sit down,” Cheyne says to an audience that already has been asked to stand as part of an immigration bit involving Americans wanting to move to Canada. (You’ll recall I said the show was well-hedged).
Everyone in the joint sat down.
Also on the plus side was a sweetly absurd sketch performed by returning talent Tim Metzler and Javid Iqbal wherein a guy living in a bachelor pad falls in love with a resident spider, as well as Cheyne, the stand-out, making an appearance inside a suitcase and Terrence Carey cracking up as he discovered the remarkable personal secrets Second City audiences are willing to reveal when they have been granted anonymity.
Know that if you like your comedy about genitalia, this also is your show. I counted at least five sketches that revolved around vaginas, a record in all of my years of Second City going, thanks in part to funny feminist material performed by Meghan Babbe and Claudia Martinez, the house specialist in wacky, bewigged characters.
Overall, I’d say that this mostly moralistic new revue doesn’t live up to its terrific predecessor, partly because the cast doesn’t challenge itself to go against its own political orthodoxies. I’ve never thought that these revues need to play it right down the middle, nor have they for years, but the only true object of satire remains power, not ideological conformity and we do have plenty of current examples of progressive power, including a mayor whose name never is mentioned, despite dominating most every news story. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of fun Chicago news that could have made an appearance in a show a bit too overweighted on individualized identity.
Tim Metzler, Jenelle Cheyne, Javid Iqbal, Claudia Martinez, Meghan Babbe and Terrence Carey in the e.t.c. Stage revue
‘Best Kept Secret’ on the Second City e.t.c. Stage
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