What’s the sign of a good musical? You leave the theatre humming the songs. And a great one? You’re also humming them in the interval, the next morning and on and on for days. That’s what happened when I first saw a rollicking production of Something Rotten! at Canada’s Stratford festival at the start of summer. Now, the day after its first London performance in a different concert version, it’s happening again.
But if this is one of the catchiest musicals I’ve ever seen, it’s also one of the funniest as it recounts downtrodden and jealous Renaissance playwright Nick Bottom’s attempts to outsmart the cocksure William Shakespeare. Gripped by the green-eyed monster, Nick visits a soothsayer, Thomas Nostradamus (nephew of the other one), to foresee the Bard’s future masterpiece and put it on himself. To say much more about his wonky vision of Hamlet would spoil a surreal second half which had audiences cracking up in Stratford and in London.
