[NEohioPAL] Review of Broadway's "Something Rotten!"

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Broadway’s delightful ‘Something Rotten’ proves it’s hard to be the Bard



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

  

To mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. is allowing priceless copies of the Bard’s precious First Folio to go on national tour.   



In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died, fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered his works and published the 900 page folio, which consists of 36 plays, 18 of which – including “Twelfth Night,” “Julius Caesar,” and “Macbeth” – had never before been printed. Fewer than 750 copies were produced and only 233 survive.  



Announcement of the tour has already reignited the long-standing debate about whether Shakespeare’s plays were actually penned, at least in part, by playwright Christopher Marlowe, essayist Francis Bacon, dramatist George Peele, adventurer Walter Raleigh or William Stanley, the 6th Earl of Derby.  The film “Anonymous,” a 2011 political thriller set in the Elizabethan court, made a convincing argument that a cultured aristocrat named Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, did most of the writing.  



Broadway’s “Something Rotten!” which opened at the St. James Theatre last April and takes place in South London in 1595, lays to rest the debate by demonstrating that Shakespeare had nary a creative bone in his body and wrote nothing that was original.  Marlowe, Bacon and the others even make a cameo appearance in the opening scene of the production before we ever set eyes on the plagiarizing Shakespeare. 



This would be a bold historical statement if the musical was meant to be anything more than a romp about the Renaissance and its theater scene.



It has no such aspirations.  “Something Rotten!” is an absolutely shameless spoof of all things Shakespeare and a deceptively smart by equally outrageous parody of Broadway musicals. 



For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.  


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