That guy Shakespeare can really do it all – comedies, tragedies, histories, romances, sonnets, epics. Also, he can twerk.
If you’ve ever longed to see the Bard of Avon shaking his ass, then speed to the St James Theater in New York, where you can catch him crammed into leather pants and a jaunty codpiece in Something Rotten!, the mildly amusing and oddly anodyne new musical comedy.
This is the first Broadway show by the brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick, and boy are they making up for lost time. The climactic number packs in references to just about every Broadway hit from the past 50 years, and a couple of flops too.
The plot centers on Nick and Nigel Bottom (Brian D’Arcy James and John Cariani), a pair of Elizabethan also-rans. Shakespeare (Christian Borle) gets the fame, the fortune, the chicks. They get overripe fruit. On a good day.
Out of desperation, Nick consults a soothsayer (Brad Oscar) and begs him to predict what Shakespeare’s next hit will be. The soothsayer, who may be mildly dyslexic, looks into the future and predicts the Tragedy of Omelette. Then he looks further and sees Cats. And singing nuns. Armed with this foreknowledge and a couple of love interests, Nick and Nigel set out to put on this scrambled show – the world’s first musical. (Good thing the ancient Greeks aren’t around to sue for copyright infringement.)
Something Rotten! goes over easy. Too easy. The songs are catchy, but quickly digested (though the opening number Welcome to the Renaissance lodges in the head nicely). The book, co-written with John O’Farrell of Spitting Image, and lyrics settle for the undemanding laugh and usually get it. The performers are excellent, of course, with James strutting his song-and-dance stuff and Borle channelling Mick Jagger, or maybe just Harry Styles. Casey Nicholaw directs in his usual pert and perky fashion, and the choreography is reasonably entertaining.
But it’s hard not to wish that the show’s creators had the set the bar and the flame just a little higher. Something Rotten! wants to be uncouth and impertinent a la The Book of Mormon, but it’s much too nice for that. The book and lyrics even excise all the obscenities, with heathens threatened with “you know where” and Shakespeare described as “freakin’ awesome”. It’s softly vulgar – there’s a near rhyme of “penis” and “genius”, to say nothing of those gluteal gyrations – but it settles for sweet when it ought to be scurrilous, comfortable when it ought to be really clever. It’s never offensive, but it’s never very exciting either. The closest it gets to iconoclastic is the song I Hate Shakespeare, a sentiment dear to the heart of most middle schoolers (and George Bernard Shaw too).
In that song Nigel complains that Shakespeare “has no sense about the audience, he makes them feel so dumb”. There’s no danger of that here. But as the author of Omelette should know, audiences don’t need to be coddled either.
