So many musicals these days come from popular movies that a truly original, based on no previous material, show is extremely rare. So when an upstart new original show announced that it would open on Broadway without any out-of-town tryout, it seemed like the height of chutzpah. What was worse, the show is called Something Rotten!, which is ammunition one should never hand to theater reviewers.
Well, I saw the show Tuesday night in one of its final press previews and while I cannot review it until tonight, the producers of Something Rotten! probably wouldn’t mind my mentioning that they have a smash hit on their hands.
It is a genuinely funny musical comedy, the sort of winking send-up of musicals that Spamalot wanted to be. The premise alone is hysterically funny. It concerns Nick and Nigel Bottom (Yes, expect a lot of anatomical jokes about “bottoms”), two Elizabethan era brothers/playwrights frustrated by being constantly overshadowed by that Will Shakespeare guy. So Nick goes to a soothsayer to learn what the next big thing in the theater will be, and he learns that he should insert songs in his plays and turn them into newfangled things called musicals. What’s more, he asks the soothsayer to look into the future and tell him what Shakespeare’s greatest play will be.
The fuzzy-headed soothsayer reports that it is called Omelette (OK, so he got it a little wrong) but Nick steals the idea, turning it into Omelette: The Musical! The score, by two Broadway neophytes, Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, take the idea and keep it paying mirth dividends for two-and-a-half hours. Humor, or course, is highly subjective and it helps a lot if you are steeped in musical theater, because the parodies and lifted quotes from Broadway come fast and frequently.
I have heard that the more serious Fun Home, which I see today, will give Something Rotten! a run for the Tony, but at the moment Rotten! seems like the show to beat.
Up next: The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time, one of several award-laden plays from Britain that arrived on our shores this season.