Performers, Producers From Across the Years Remain All In On ‘All-Nighter’

As Jerome Powell ’75 delivers his Baccalaureate speech to the Class of 2025, a Federal Reserve fangirl gushes to her friends about the staid speaker’s interest rate talking points, giddily anticipating each line like hits on a favorite band’s setlist. But when the Fed chairman wanders off script, the stage goes dark and investors panic in real time. The seniors pull out their phones, desperately trying to sell off their stocks, but it’s too late!

No, Powell did not crash the markets with his remarks to Princeton’s graduating class. But the imagined doomsday scenario did draw roaring laughter from a standing-room-only audience at Frist Campus Center during the May 22 Reunions episode of All-Nighter, a student sketch comedy and talk show wrapping up its 13th season.

The show, a relatively new addition to the Reunions schedule, attracts a beer jacket crowd — mostly graduating seniors and alums of the past few years — and packs a lot into one hour, with high energy sketches and quick transitions. This year’s episode, loosely built around the theme of reality TV, featured riffs on The Bachelor, Love Island, and Shark Tank, along with Princeton-specific humor, commercial spoofs, an interview with actress Tessa Albertson ’20, a song by undergrad rock band Casual Riot, and a diSiac dance performance.

“It does get a little hectic,” says executive producer Gia Musselwhite ’25. “It’s something that we do because we love it.”

That was true from the start, says David Drew ’14, All-Nighter’s original host, who watched the Reunions show from a seat along the center aisle. Drew and co-founders Amy Solomon ’14 and Adam Mastroianni ’14 launched the show on a shoestring budget and built an audience by bringing on star students (Olympic athletes, talented musicians) as well as notable “grown-up guests” (poet and professor Paul Muldoon, then-SPIA dean Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, the newly appointed President Christopher Eisgruber ’83).

“There are so many cool people at this place,” Solomon says. “I feel like that’s what really endures.”

When the founders graduated, they handed off the show in hopes that it would continue for at least another year. More than a decade later, it’s had a dozen different hosts and continues to draw “sellout” crowds (tickets are free but need to be claimed in advance). This past academic year, they produced six episodes with a budget of about $100 per show for props and costumes, accordng to Musselwhite.

According to Mastroianni, Drew’s sidekick for two seasons, All-Nighter owes its longevity to the producers and showrunners.

“Of course people want to be on stage and do their thing, but every generation needs the person who’s going to make the show happen,” he says. “Like, our generation’s was Amy. If you have one year where you don’t have the successor to Amy, the show’s gone forever. And I think the fact that there’s been an unbroken chain of showrunners … that’s the most miraculous part.”

The Reunions show serves as a transition between the departing cast and the incoming one, so this year, host and co-host Isis Arevalo ’25 and Alison Silldorff ’25 shared the stage with their successors, Tyler Wilson ’26 and Sophia Shepherd ’26.

In the final sketch, Arevalo and Silldorff come to grips with leaving Princeton, realizing that it’s time to move on and the next group is going to be amazing. “And by amazing,” Silldorff clarifies, “I mean vulgar, gross, and upsetting.”

Cue the Saturday Night Live-style curtain call. As cast members gather on stage and take their bows, they wrap the show with the signoff that All-Nighter has been using since its debut episode: “Get some sleep!”