Imagine you are a playwright in the late 1500s.
That was William Shakespeare’s heyday. How is one to compete with him?
That’s the dilemma the Bottom brothers face in “Something Rotten.” Broadway in Tucson brings the non-union roadshow to Centennial Hall Feb. 5-10.
The brothers’ theater is failing, so they’ve got to come up with something that will draw audiences away from Will and to them. A soothsayer (Thomas Nostradamus, nephew of the famous one) tells them the next big thing will be musicals. You know, where you sing and dance and talk all in one show. It has never been done before.
So the Bottoms come up with one about the Black Death (“that pesty little pestilence is killing half of Europe/It’s the Black Death” go the lyrics) That just doesn’t cut it with their all-important patron, who abandons them.
A return trip to Nostradamus is in order. They want to know what will be Shakespeare’s next big hit. “Omelette,” they are told (a misread of “Hamlet.”)
So the Bottoms write “Omelette: The Musical.”
And learn a few lessons in the process — all, we suspect, as over-the-top as the play’s premise.
Characters in “Something Rotten” may sound familiar: There’s a moneylender named Shylock; one of the Bottom brothers has fallen for a woman named Portia; Shakespeare takes the name Toby Belch and auditions. (Shakespeare loves to steal material, and the new musical might provide an excellent opportunity to do so.)
Yes, it is all perfectly silly. And a whopping parody of Broadway musicals.
“Something Rotten” long festered in the minds of its creators, Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, brothers who wanted to, well, create a hit.
“It was a series of conversations that happened over many years,” Karey Kirkpatrick said in a 2018 interview.
“We were big history buffs. We started with ‘wouldn’t it be funny if Shakespeare’s London were a lot like what Broadway was like in the ’30s?’ And went from there.”
The play landed a load of Tony nominations, though won only a few awards for acting. And it got mixed reviews. Audiences, however, raved, often giving the Broadway production standing ovations, sometimes in the middle of the play, as well as at the end.
