Second City’s ‘Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone’ keeps the audience on its toes

The six comedians are a dynamic ensemble, creating various memorable characters.

Gabe Hawkins and Miguel Tsang

November 24, 2024

While a mystery may seem like an unlikely premise for a premiere comedy showcase, The Second City is quick to prove otherwise.

In the comedy club’s 48th revue, The Second City explores the anatomy of a secret with active audience participation in its showing of “Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone.”

As audience members filed into the theater, they were offered white slips prompting them to write a secret and to deposit the paper in a bucket on the side of the stage.

These secrets were intended to be read aloud giddily throughout the show. For instance, one audience member confessed to stealing the ashes of their ex’s grandmother after being cheated on. Another attendee disclosed they made out with a performing clown at a county fair. A third admitted they were in love with their best friend’s father.

As the night unfolded, many sketches touched on current events with political undertones.

One standout sketch featured a customs agent (Jenelle Cheyne) administering a citizenship test to the audience. In a timely twist, she revealed her identity as a Canadian agent who had been hired due to the influx of Americans fleeing the country’s political climate. After introducing herself, she asked the audience to sit down if they had seen a gun before, prompting most to take their seat and disqualifying them from citizenship. Ultimately, only three lucky audience members were granted admission, the rest too corrupted by their American experiences.

The Second City ensemble incorporated not only the audience’s secrets into comedy acts but also the attendees themselves. One sketch invited an audience member to partake in a “heist,” where each of the six cast members led the attendee along an elaborate series of gags until the cast was ultimately able to steal her bag in a moment of distraction.

Though various points in the first act felt overdone, the show found its groove after intermission, where it explored a more short-form style rather than full-length “Saturday Night Live”-style skits. In its integration of shorter acts sandwiched between longer sketches, audience momentum remained intact, with these brief bits sometimes outshining the sketches themselves.

Despite its variety of comedic approaches, the show sometimes struggled to keep the audience engaged with its running jokes. In a recurring segment called “Sexual Secrets,” various long-winded truths were revealed to the audience, many of which centered around hot-button issues including immigration and gun control. Awkwardly framed in context of the show, the bit felt increasingly lazy and overstated as the night drew on, with its humor relying entirely on whispered political ramblings disguised as “hot takes.” The audience’s laughs at “Sexual Secrets” took a sharp decline after the bit’s initial introduction.

However, “Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone” is an amusing and creatively-rendered watch, featuring animated and memorable characters and a dynamic ensemble. The revue runs through September 2025.

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Email: [email protected]