There appeared to be many repeat attendees at the performance. When the cast asked the audience for suggestions for a title for that night’s play, they were ready with a host of responses clearly thought out ahead of time. Otherwise how would you explain an immediate shout out of the chosen title – The Gift of the Gobbler? One doesn’t come up with that out of thin air in a split second.

So, given that the premise of the performance is not taking a named Shakespearean work and riffing off of it, which I would have known had I read that part of the promotion that said a “fully improvised play in Elizabethan style using the language and themes of William Shakespeare”, what makes this show Improvised Shakespeare? Nothing. That’s just to draw you in, which I’m glad it did.

So what made the product Shakespearean? Well, they used the word proffer a lot even though there weren’t any lawyers or courtroom scenes in the show.

There was a woman playing a man and men playing women and none of them were named Yentl or Tootsie.

There was British royalty, scheming, and a lot of rhyming, but no one named Hamilton.

Enough people died that it suggested either Shakespeare, George R.R. Martin, or Quentin Tarantino, but there wasn’t any nudity, so not Martin, and there weren’t any profanities or racial slurs, so not Tarantino.

Though many of the characters died on stage, none of the actors did, relying on their perseverance, skills and tricks of the trade (both short and long form improvisation “need a mechanism in place to relieve the audience of the excruciating pain of a scene that is not working”) to entertain and move the story forward.

As is often said, dying is easy, comedy is hard.