Nothing is rotten in Marriott’s Something Rotten. While this experience wasn’t quite the same as when I was lucky enough to see Christian Borle in his Tony-award-winning performance as the show’s original Shakespeare, the Marriott production is great, and its Shakespeare, Adam Jacobs, who played Aladdin on Broadway, has the audience in the palm of his hand, just like he had the genie’s lamp.
The show is sort of Forbidden Broadway meets Mel Brooks, with some Puritans thrown in for good measure, and enough colorful costumes to outfit several Renaissance Halloween parties.
If you’ve never seen another musical and know nothing about Shakespeare’s works, you may miss dozens of references and wonder why everyone around you is laughing, but, if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be out in public anyway.
If you can’t enjoyably groan when Toby reveals himself to be Shakespeare in disguise by saying Toby or not Toby, that is the question, stay home.
The show-stopping song, A Musical, contains references to 20 other musicals that fly by so fast that you wish you had an annotation with you. Well, here are a couple, one provided by Theater Nerds, and the other by, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.
The show features one slightly off-center soothsayer; two playwriting brothers with writer’s block; triple threat performers who sing, dance, and cook(?); and an omelet, which, I can’t help myself, was an eggcelent addition.
The cast is uniformly outstanding, but I’ll single out Cassie Slater as Bea because it gives me an excuse for saying that I saw her perform at Steppenwolf in We Three: Loud Her. Fast Her. Funny Her. with Meghan Murphy, whom I never miss an opportunity for mentioning and whom I will be seeing soon as The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.