It’s the time of year when theater critics gird themselves for their nth annual Nutcracker/Christmas Carol/Wonderful Life cycle. That’s not a complaint. Necessarily. I once described the yuletide season as a “psychic pogrom,” but I’ve mellowed since then. For one thing, I get to enjoy holiday shows like Strawdog’s The Long Christmas Ride Home that aren’t out to deck anybody’s halls—or wreck them, either—but to tell an interesting story really well. For another, I find repetition as seductive as anybody. There’s a sweet sense of deja vu in watching Clara/Scrooge/George Bailey come through their dark nights of the soul for the millionth time. And pleasure too, if it’s done with some panache.
Naturally, given the theme, the bit comes back later in the show. But otherwise the uncanny sense of events repeating themselves gets only cursory attention over the course of the 25 sketches preceding intermission. It’s after the break that the payoff comes. The relatively brief final stretch of Fool Me Twice revisits earlier skits, tweaking a gag here, reversing the point of view there so that, for instance, a vignette involving a Little League batter who’d much rather be auditioning for the school musical returns to us told from the pitcher’s perspective. Fool Me Twice is quite literally out to fool us twice with the same material.
Wed-Thu 8 PM, Fri-Sat 8 and 11 PM, Sun 7 PM, Tue 8 PM Second City 1616 N. Wells 312-337-3992secondcity.com $23-$48
