Orlando Fringe 2025 review: Breaking Bard: ‘An Improvised Shakespearean Tragedy’

If you’ve blown through every play by the Bard on your bookshelf and are still begging for more, why not go see Spontaneous Shakespeare Co. give birth to a brand-new folio that sounds like it could have spilled from the quill of Billy Shakes himself?

From the slender threads of a few simple audience suggestions (“playful and “castle” at the press preview) this creative Canadian quintet weaves together an entirely improvised lost Shakespearean tragedy. Improving in iambic pentameter ain’t easy, and but this cast bats better than .500 at composing coherent verse. They do even better producing pseudo-Elizabethan prose, and the ridiculous plot points the troupe piles up — involving a medieval whoopee cushion and Connect Four — are only a little more conveniently contrived than those of, say, Troilus and Cressida.

Based on the audible gasps, audience members at the preview became as engaged in the Spontaneous Shakespeare Co.’s dramatically satisfying outcome as in any scripted story. That’s largely thanks to Martina Vos, who makes a winsome and wily heroine; and especially Brent Hirose, the troupe’s artistic director, who keeps the chaos comfortably on track by expertly applying rhyming buttons to the ends of significant stanzas.

Of all the groups attempting improv at this Orlando Fringe, Spontaneous Shakespeare Co. has set for themselves the toughest challenge, and they have the talented tongues to tackle it.

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This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.