After hearing our friends' favorable review of "Something Rotten," I decided to see it in San Francisco's Orpheum Theater (if I could get reasonably priced tickets).
Today, on Sunday, September 3, when I checked my iPhone's TodayTix app, I realized that some seats could be available at the $40/ticket price. At 09:00, I got the $40 Rush tickets (which turned out to be in Row Y of Orchestra for the 14:00 performance).
The Mercury News wrote a delightfully accurate review of Something Rotten. I am posting a short excerpt below:
One thing you have to admit about the new Shakespearean spoof “Something Rotten,” it comes dangerously close to living up to its title. Despite being very funny at times, I found the music and lyrics a bit uninspired.
“Rotten” slices and dices the Shakespearean canon until it’s as cheesy as a Denver omelette. The rub is that once you’ve heard one Shakespeare gag, you’ve heard them all.
The plot’s a nonstop Bard put-down. The preening peacock Will (a wonderfully funny Adam Pascal) is the rock star of the London literary scene and he has a lock on box office returns, so Nick (Rob McClure) and Nigel Bottom (a nuanced Josh Grisetti) decide to up the ante with a new genre. Nick pays a soothsayer to predict what the future holds for the theater and the prediction is for — wait for it — musical comedy. Enter the “Hamlet” parody known as “Omelette: The Musical,” which leaves the brothers with a lot of egg on their faces.
Both Shakespeare and Broadway get a drubbing here which is kind of fun, for a little while. There are some funny bits, particularly Nostradamus’ (an astute Blake Hammond) epic song and dance number summoning the ghost of musicals yet to come in a massive name-checking chorus line. He shimmies and sashays from “Les Miz” to “Avenue Q” in a cheeky showstopper (“A Musical”) that goes so far over the top it’s upside down.
Songs like “I Hate Shakespeare” and “The Black Death” feel uninspired. It’s a bit like “Spamalot” if you take away the Monty Python stuff.
Despite McClure’s engaging performance as the ink-stained wretch Nick and Pascal’s (“Rent”) stylish strutting as the leather-clad Billy Idol-style rock god, moaning that it’s “Hard to be the Bard,” the play is not quite the thing here. The shtick is the real star of the show, from the groaner puns spewed by a mincing Puritan preacher (Scott Cote) who seems obsessed with bottoms to the overstuffed codpieces and the fangirls holding up candles (the precursor to the lighter) at the Shakespeare concert.
In the funniest and most insightful joke of the evening, the moment that had the audience roaring with applause, the soothsayer has premonitions about musicals in the future. He gets flashes and images but nothing definitive. For instance he knows you have to solve a problem like Maria and he knows there are people called Nazis. When asked if these Nazis are good or bad, he demurs.The elastic-limbed choreography is consistently eye-catching and the costumes are pithy, but the words or the observations rarely get anywhere near as noteworthy as the production values.
Something Rotten Report Card
Positives
- Full of zany zingers, making fun of Shakespeare and most American Musicals
- Very funny at times
- "The Black Death" song seems uninspired/kitschy
- Stage Decorations were average
- Most of the songs are not of the same level as other musicals, such as Spamalot (not to mention Chicago or Anything Goes)
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