Review: Egg-spressive Brothers Cook Up SOMETHING ROTTEN for Elizabethan Stage

The more you know about Shakespeare - and the more you know about Broadway musicals - love 'em or hate 'em - the more you'll laugh out loud at SOMETHING ROTTEN. Conceived by songwriter Wayne Kirkpatrick and funnyman Karey Kirkpatrick, who teamed up on the music and lyrics (with a book by Karey K. and John O'Farrell), ROTTEN smells a lot like The Producers exported to Elizabethan England. Very much like the Mel Brooks classic, two partners hatch an impossibly bad idea for a hit show.

Big difference: the Bottom brothers, Nick and Nigel, aren't trying to birth the biggest bomb of all time. Fueled by an intense jealousy of William Shakespeare, a bard of rockstar celebrity who shamelessly steals all of Nigel's best lines, Nick seeks out a soothsayer to help him beat Shakespeare to the next big thing in theatre - and to Shakespeare's greatest hit.

The soothsayer, Nostradamus, can hardly believe what he sees himself when he peers into the future. That's because the seer doesn't exactly see it with 20/20 vision. Through a glass foggily, Nostradamus sees that musicals are the future, isn't quite sure how and why they work, and his divinations are sprinkled with inklings of Cats, Fiddler, Annie, Phantom, Lion King, tap dance, kick lines, and much more. Using his own imagination, Nick's "The Black Death" isn't quite the artistic abortion that "Springtime for Hitler" would be, but the showman realizes he's in trouble.

So he returns to Nostradamus, reasoning that he can produce a musical version of the greatest tragedy Shakespeare hasn't yet written. Once again, the soothsayer can't quite read the eye chart. He confidently outlines the scrambled story of "Omelet." Egg-citedly, Nick launches into an even more misbegotten concept, trying to whip up Nigel's enthusiasm for "Omelet: The Musical." You can write some truly rotten stuff when eggs are your inspiration.

That's where the score manages to shine most brightly - in the Kirkpatricks' intentionally rotten songs. There's also a certain mean animus to Nick's "God, I Hate Shakespeare" that I liked, contrasted with the panache of Shakespeare's "Will Power" and the pampered idol's excessive pouting in "Hard to Be the Bard." But the opening "Welcome to the Renaissance," severely overmiked on opening night, is gratifyingly transformed into the evening's prime showstopper, "A Musical." A bit of self-satire creeps in at the end of the show when the oh-so-familiar tune outwears its freshness with one last permutation.

On the other hand, the clever script provides a bounty of hambone for the cast to sink its teeth into - and a lot for Shakespeare to keep stealing, for besides Bottom, there is a Yorick, a Peter Quince, a Portia, and even a Jewish Shylock roaming the stage. While Adam Pascal offers us a glitzier gloss on Shakespeare than Christian Borle's on Broadway, it plays well, and Blake Hammond's Nostradamus is very much in the gonzo footsteps of Brad Oskar.

Nick's sponsorship problems open the door for Jeff Brooks' comical antics as Shylock, and Nigel's budding love life meets some funny, latently gay opposition from Scott Cote as Brother Jeremiah, Portia's puritanical dad. While the female roles aren't much to feast on, both Autumn Hurlbert as Portia and Maggie Lakis as Nick's wife Bea show signs of modernity and liberation. Admiring Nigel's talent, Portia proves to be familiar with contemporary Elizabethan poets, and worried that their future dreams might be hobbled by Nick's financial woes, Bea goes out and gets a job.

A shitty job, but it's a job.

The Kirkpatricks manage to conceive a satisfying pair of brothers with different outlooks and solid loyalties - a mundane verisimilitude that allows the more outré supporting cast members to repeatedly steal the show from them. Josh Grisetti as Nigel charms us with his purity and his shyness while Rob McClure as Nick brims with all the right energy you need to hawk the rotten ideas that drive SOMETHING ROTTEN. Ah, but when it's a foregone conclusion that you'll never be as funny as the Nick Bottom that Shakespeare created, a certain amount of flop sweat comes with the gig.

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