On & Off Broadway

'Something Rotten'

Reviewed by Elyse Trevers

Posted

Did Shakespeare bore you in high school? Well, you’ve never seen him like this. In an hysterical new musical by Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick entitled Something Rotten, Shakespeare (the delightful Christian Borle) is a Renaissance rock star clad in skintight leather. If the show’s title sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the words come from Act I of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, foreshadowing the tragedy to follow. With direction and choreography by Tony Award winner Casey Nicholaw, Something Rotten begins slightly silly and gets uproariously funny.

Set during the 1500’s, the comedy is a bit over-the-top with lots of sexual innuendos and visual humor. Nick Bottom and his younger brother, Nigel, are playwrights, but sadly they aren’t successful. Nick (the talented Brian d’Arcy James) is particularly resentful of a competitor, one Will Shakespeare, whom he fired from the acting troupe because he wasn’t talented enough.

Despite his success and feeling pressure to stay on top, Shakespeare is not above stealing other peoples’ ideas and names, so he disguises himself and joins Bottom’s troupe.

Nick is desperate for a hit, especially when he learns that his wife, Bea (Heidi Blickenstaff), an early feminist, is pregnant. Throughout the play, she disguises herself as a man and, toward the end, she portrays a lawyer defending her husband. Nick takes all their savings and finds a soothsayer, a cousin of Nostradamus, whom he pays to predict the next big thing in theater: Musicals. When asked, the soothsayer (an outrageous Brad Oscar) predicts Shakespeare’s greatest hit. Unfortunately, his vision is a bit cloudy so the great tragedy Hamlet becomes the musical Omelet with allusions to several other shows.

Many of the players bear names of Shakespearean characters, though their depiction is quite different. Shylock is the Jewish “angel” who insists on investing in Bottom’s play, and Portia, the beautiful young daughter of a zealot Puritan, falls in love with Nigel. Nick Bottom, the main character’s name, is actually used for a comic figure in Midsummer Night’s Dream who winds up with donkey ears on his head.

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