For once, Broadway musical fans are treated to an original show that doesn’t derive from a cartoon (Spongebob Squarepants, Annie), an ancient novel (Les Miserables), or an old film (King Kong). Instead, audiences are treated to something that, while not completely fabulous, at least it isn’t something that’s pulled off a shelf. It’s something completely new, and refreshingly so.
Determined to conquer with its high-energy dancing, puns, double entendres and general silliness, the national tour or Something Rotten! opened in Milwaukee at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts.
A bit of back story: the musical opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater in 2015, starring James D’Arcy. It was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, but won only one (for Christian Borle, as Best Featured Actor in a Musical).
The show is set in 1595 and opens with perhaps its best song, “Welcome to the Renaissance,” led by a narrating minstrel. The minstrel introduces two down-on-their-luck playwrights, Nick and Nigel Bottom (Matthew Michael Janisse and Richard Spitaletta, respectively). Along with every other playwright in England, they can’t find financial backing for their productions because the populace is so smitten by William Shakespeare. (As historians know, this wasn’t true; many other playwrights were at least as well-received as Shakespeare during his lifetime. So much for historical accuracy.) To amp up the humor, a black-leather-clad Shakespeare (Matthew Baker) is presented as a rock-star.
As the Bottoms’s stage company threatens to fall apart, a desperate Nick Bottom, the older and less talented of the brothers, consults a soothsayer (Greg Kalafatas) for advice. He asks the soothsayer for advice on what theatrical entertainment will be popular in the future. After his hilariously overplayed spastic fit, the soothsayer comes up with the answer: musicals. He explains that, in a musical, actors must sing and dance to develop their characters and move the plot along. Nick is very apprehensive of this approach, but he follows the soothsayer’s advice. In a huge production number called, “A Musical,” the cast spoofs half a dozen well-known musicals, everything from Chicago to South Pacific and On the Town .
But Nick isn’t satisfied until he can top Shakespeare’s greatest hit and eventually winds up with a half-baked musical premise called Omelette. The soothsayer says this musical will rival in popularity Shakespeare’s still unwritten Hamlet.
Shakespeare gets wind of the Bottom brothers’ new production and has a look for himself when posing as a newcomer called Toby Belch. (It should be noted that several of the characters here turn out to be characters from Shakespeare’s plays, such as Portia, Falstaff, and Shylock.)
There’s more foolishness at work here, including subplots involving a conflict between Nick and his wife, one of history’s first feminists. There’s also a romance between Nigel Bottom and the seemingly unattainable, puritanical Portia (Jennifer Elizabeth Smith).
In general, Something Rotten! is presented as a ridiculous send-up of some of Shakespeare’s plots, but the show makes no apologies for its goofy humor. In sum, it’s raucous, silly and irreverent, in the same way one might find Monty Python’s Spamalot. It may not all be in good taste, but it’s certainly all in good fun.
