Something Rotten

Music & Lyrics by Wayne Kirkpatrick & Karey Kirkpatrick

Book by Karey Kirkpatrick & John O’Farrell

Directed by Ilana Ransom Toeplitz

Lyric Stage Boston

May 1 – June 7, 2026

It only takes a moment to realize Something Rotten is delicious. The sweetness, without the sorrow, titillates your senses for the next two-and-a-half hours. It’s an unrelenting good time for anyone, but if you picked up the lyrical references in the first two lines of this post (Hello, Dolly! and A Chorus Line) than Something Rotten is a special treat for you!

I must admit to knowing nothing about Something Rotten when I entered Lyric Stage’s intimate theater, beyond the certainty that the Lyric always creates musical magic in their final show every season. Turns out, Something Rotten ran for almost two years on Broadway, garnered ten Tony nominations in 2015, but lost highest honors to Fun Home. I’ll grant that Fun Home has more heft, but actually, that tale of a lesbian coming of age in a funeral home is not nearly as much fun.

Here’s the plot, though it hardly matters. Welcome to the Renaissance: England 1595. Will Shakespeare is all the rage, while playwright wannabe Nick Bottom and his younger brother Nigel, suffer by comparison. Truth is, Nigel’s a beautiful, empathic writer. Shakespeare knows it (and often steals his stuff) while big brother Nick refuses to develop the small human tragedies Nigel pens. He wants big! So, he spends his last savings on a soothsayer, Nostradamus, who tells him that Shakespeare’s greatest play will feature a Danish and an omelet (close, but not quite a Dane named Hamlet). More importantly, Nostradamus foresees that the big profits in the theater business will all flow to something called a musical. Thus, Nick puts all his energy into producing the world’s most over-the-top breakfast song and dance. There’s also a clever wife, a limp-wristed Puritan with a sensuous daughter, Portia, and a gentle Jew named Shylock. It’s hard to differentiate the real Shakespeare references from the fake ones. But that’s all part of the fun.

What does matter in Something Rotten is that you have a good time, which Lyric’s superb production delivers every moment. The cast is terrific A to Zed. Kristian Espiritu as Nick’s wife, Bea, and Lauren Dodds as catchy Portia have lovely singing voices. Jared Troilo’s Shakespeare is so oily he’s fun to hate, Joy Clark’s Nostradamus is comedic perfection, while the triple threat Ryan Mardesich as Nick Bottom glues the entire production together and jockeys its galloping pace. There is so much stage business, so deftly executed, you hardly know where to rest your eyes. The songs are Broadway catchy and dense with clever lyrics. The big number halfway through Act One, in which Nostradamus introduces the concept of “A Musical” contains so many fleeting references to White Way classic tunes, along with corresponding lyric allusions, you give up trying to track them. With so much energy spent so early, I wondered how the show could maintain it’s momentum. Not to worry: it does.

History in books is dry. Serious documentary sacrifices passion for accuracy. School House Rock played history loose, but kept our elementary attention. The only thing rotten about Something Rotten is the history it tells because, like any recalcitrant child, it refuses to stay in its place and time. It’s a crazy mashup of 1595 and 2015, and any number of arbitrary years in between. A mash-up is a theatrically tricky. How to balance place and time and tone. Where to lean into the parallels between then and now, and when to just let them loose in the off-chance the audience will notice. The mash-up spirit in both the play, and Lyric’s production, is brilliant. The sensibility of farce to feminism, of silliness to eloquence, of witty to wistful, weaves through every line, every lyric, every character, every bit of choreographed perfection. It comes at you so fast, so funny.

So go see Something Rotten. You’ll have a great time. And if you don’t catch it all on the first round. Go again.