The Bard gets lightly roasted
The writers are most at home when they can skitter among Shakespearean and musical allusions; everything else is just an excuse to get there.
There are a few terrific numbers in “Something Rotten,” a musical that imagines the creation of the first musical by two hapless thespian brothers in competition with the rock star figure of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England. But what’s terrific about them also hints at the limitations of the touring show that opened Wednesday, Aug. 16, at SHN’s Orpheum Theatre.
When the bossy but maladroit Nick Bottom (Rob McClure) launches into “God, I Hate Shakespeare,” you’ll likely feel a mighty catharsis. That’s whether, walking in, you’re inclined to agree with Nick’s title lyric or the chorus’ panicked response to it: “How can you say that?” McClure, who throughout the show makes Nick into a combustible bundle of neuroses, here focuses all that energy into a righteous tirade, channeling and releasing the frustrations most of us have felt about the self-congratulation our foremost dramatist tends to in-
spire in his acolytes.
Show tunes need to further plot and character, though, and rarely do those here achieve that goal. “Something Rotten!” only encourages that criticism of itself, when Nick visits soothsayer Nostradamus (Blake Hammond) in hopes of getting a sneak peak at theater’s next big thing. It is, of course, “A Musical,” one of the show’s other high points. It doesn’t take much to reveal America’s beloved art form as ridiculous; all “A Musical” has to do is enumerate its own conventions, from the very idea of bursting into song down to the kick line.
Yet the song only roasts to exalt. An array of references to exemplars of the canon, from “The Music Man” to “Chicago,” from “Annie” to “Jesus Christ Superstar,” overwhelms. If it’s often said that Shakespeare’s greatness derives in part from his ability to encompass the whole range of human experience, “A Musical” slyly makes the case that taken as a whole, this genre oft derided as fluffy, maudlin entertainment accomplishes the same.
Writers Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Wayne Kirkpatrick are most at home when they can skitter among Shakespearean and musical allusions; everything else in “Something Rotten” is just an excuse to get there. Eventually, even the references, hollow lines from signpost characters, start to weary, the gags going puerile because the show hasn’t taken the time to develop situations that would yield richer fruit.
One exception, though, is the Puritan character of Brother Jeremiah. In Scott Cote’s glorious rendering, the moralist is so self-satisfied that he holds his jaw as if to feed off the insides of his own cheeks. Accidentally spouting off double entendre after double entendre — it’s a sort of 16th century “that’s what she said” — he’ll momentarily register disgust and shame, and then, remembering his unassailable power, recommence his foppish flouncing. It’s a master class in clowning essentials: a series of carefully defined and communicated discoveries and decisions.
“Something Rotten!” paints Brother Jeremiah, Nick, Shakespeare, all of us as equally inarticulate. (Here’s all Shakespeare has to say about work: “It’s hard.”) Yet somehow, our burning desire for communication, for the word or the song that will perfectly capture that inchoate impression or feeling, occasionally pushes us past our woeful limitations, and through some mysterious alchemy, we eke out the tragedy, or the musical, that our fellow humans latch onto as spiritual manna. “Something Rotten!” might not itself be one of those miracles, but it’s a mostly entertaining paean to the works of art that are.