Longtime Stratford Festival director and choreographer Donna Feore returns with Something Rotten!, on stage until Oct. 27.David Hou/Supplied
- Title: Something Rotten!
- Book by: Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell
- Music and Lyrics by: Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick
- Director: Donna Feore
- Actors: Mark Uhre, Henry Firmston, Dan Chameroy
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to October 27, 2024
Critic’s Pick
Well, I’ll never take Donna Feore for granted again.
The long-time Stratford Festival director and choreographer is back after a year’s absence with a production of Something Rotten! that is anything but.
Feore elevates this silly Broadway musical comedy set in Shakespeare’s time into a proper summer blockbuster by filling it with dazzling dance and hilariously hammy performances. The show’s far from deep – but audiences seeking to banish the despair of our times for a few hours will happily revisit it all season long.
Something Rotten! also finally makes a star out of Mark Uhre, a well-established Canadian musical-theatre performer with an incredible, versatile voice who has never quite found the ideal role to showcase his acting talents.
As the lead character Nick Bottom, Uhre has been given permission to let out his inner scenery-chewer, and he brings down the house with his comic portrayal of this scheming character.
Something Rotten! imagines a pair of Bottom brothers who write plays in Elizabethan London.
Nick is rotting away with jealousy over the playwriting success of an actor he once fired named William Shakespeare, while Nigel Bottom (Henry Firmston), his younger sibling, is a sweet poet and secret admirer of that Bard of Avon.
Amid an escalating series of personal and professional financial crises, Nick heads to see a soothsayer named Thomas Nostradamus (Dan Chameroy) and spends his life savings for a prediction about the future of theatre – and what will be Shakespeare’s biggest hit.
Dan Chameroy plays the soothsayer Nostradamus in Something Rotten!Ann Baggley/Supplied
In a number simply called A Musical, Nostradamus outlines a world where people go to see shows in which actors seamlessly segue from dialogue to song.
Cue the opportunity for Feore to visually reference every single musical she’s ever mounted on Festival Theatre’s thrust stage – from The Sound of Music to A Chorus Line – and a number she hasn’t either.
If you love the genre, you’ll be over the moon at this live-action montage. The results that Feore gets out of her choruses, as usual, are as polished as you’ll find on any stage anywhere. The ensemble nails every choreographic quote from Robbins to Fosse and every comic beat to boot.
Nostradamus also foresees Shakespeare’s best play – but his vision returns slightly scrambled. This leads to the Bottom brothers mounting another big musical number that spoofs Shakespeare and the classic musical canon in a style that’s just as comically cracking.
In between the meta-musical set-pieces, Something Rotten! has some semblance of plot to link the jokes.
Nigel – who couldn’t be more adorably depicted by Firmston – falls in love with a poetry-loving Puritan named Portia (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane) whose father (Juan Chioran) is, of course, opposed to their romance.
Henry Firmston stars as Nigel Bottom, a sweet poet and secret admirer of Shakespeare.Ann Baggley/Supplied
Then, there’s Shakespeare himself, whose anxieties lead him to go into disguise and spy on the Bottoms. Jeff Lillico plays him as a vain rockstar with a Queen-style number called Hard to be the Bard.
Also in the musical is Nick’s wife Bea (Starr Domingue) – who’s there to subvert female stereotypes, yet ultimately is still a secondary character who could easily be cut. A much more fun female part is the patron Lady Clapham, played with panache by Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah in a series of killer comic cameos.
I’d be lying if I said I cared about any of the characters or invested in any of the relationships. The glimpses of Feore’s productions past were a reminder of how much more rounded and well-crafted classic musicals are.
Like Spamalot, seen at Stratford last season, Something Rotten! is a male-heavy modern musical comedy with weak women characters and jokes that bring up stereotypes in order to subvert them – rather than just, you know, coming up with fresh, original ways of portraying human beings.
Unlike Spamalot, Something Rotten! doesn’t have the excuse of being based on a 1975 film from an all-male comedy troupe. The show – with songs by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick, and a book by John O’Farrell and Karey Kirkpatrick – is from 2015.
But it has what Spamalot was missing last season – a production as good as, or better than, you’ll see anywhere else and staged in a unique fashion on the festival’s thrust. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed Feore’s work.