Apples to Improv You’ve got to hand it to this Under the Gun troupe for opening its family-friendly improv show on a holiday weekend—perhaps unsurprisingly, our audience was only slightly larger than the entire cast of five. The somewhat casual production is loosely inspired by the card game Apples to Apples Junior; familiarity with it might help but isn’t required as dealt cards offer subjects, topics, and themes to inspire the team-based competition. I admired the spontaneous quirkiness—the memory of grandma shaking a turkey neck at Thanksgiving, a baseball sketch done entirely in gestures. The kids in the audience loved being a part of the silliness; still, the format could use some tightening before it’s ready for prime time. —Suzanne Scanlon
Man of La Mancha If ever a revival truly revived anything, this is it. Premiering on Broadway in 1965, the musical by Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion became too big a hit for its own good, sliding past the iconic right into the cliched. Its signature tune in particular, “The Impossible Dream,” devolved into a byword for mawkish sentiment as it got done and done everywhere from high-school auditoriums to piano bars. But Nick Bowling’s production for Marriott Theatre reminds us, vividly, of a crucial fact: that the actual setting for the song is a miserable holding cell, where Miguel de Cervantes sits among murderers and thieves while awaiting trial before the Inquisition. Accomplished with fluorescent tube lights, prison tattoos, harsh buzzers, and ugly fight choreography, Bowling’s emphatic deromanticizing yields a show that resembles Marat/Sade more than Camelot. A formidable cast led by Nathaniel Stampley, Richard Ruiz, and the marvelous Danni Smith yields intensity. —Tony Adler
