What do you think?
Rate this book
Something Rotten!: Libretto Vocal Book
"[…] A deliriously entertaining new musical comedy that is devilishly clever under its goofy exterior. The influences are clear: “The Producers,” “Spamalot” and “The Book of Mormon.” Yep, this is a blockbuster." The New York Post
The hilarious 9-time Tony Award-nominated Something Rotten! is ready for your stage!
Set in the 1590s, brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom are desperate to write a hit play but are stuck in the shadow of Shakespeare. When a local soothsayer foretells that the future of theatre involves singing, dancing and acting at the same time, Nick and Nigel set out to write the world’s first musical.
The hilarious 9-time Tony Award-nominated Something Rotten! is ready for your stage!
Set in the 1590s, brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom are desperate to write a hit play but are stuck in the shadow of Shakespeare. When a local soothsayer foretells that the future of theatre involves singing, dancing and acting at the same time, Nick and Nigel set out to write the world’s first musical.
- GenresPlays
133 pages, ebook
First published March 23, 2015
1 person is currently reading
18 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 12, 2024
Goodreads looking a little bare time to log the libretto
May 13, 2022
A common criticism of theatre is that it's generally 20 years behind other artistic mediums. Expressionism entered theatre a couple decades after it died in painting. Even within performance mediums, television will often be tackling something years before theatre gets its trousers on to give chase. Part of this is the longer time it takes to get a big production mounted, part of this is simply that the bigger a theatre piece is aiming for the more banal it has to be to sell tickets.
And within this paradigm, musicals are often 10-20 years behind straight plays. Musicals take even longer to become realized owing to the multiple talents that go in to writing them, their massive casts, sets, and so forth. All this to say, one of the major themes of theatre has become meta-theatre. Theatre about theatre. There are some interesting inspections of theatre and the people who do it like Moon Over Buffalo and A Company of Wayward Saints and it's gone on so long that there are an endless supply of middle schools plays to the tune of "Hijinks ensue as theatre kids put on a play." And so it is that musicals come to the tail end of the movement. We've had good examinations like Cabaret and A Chorus Line and now we have Something Rotten!
Something Rotten is a cavalcade of musical references piled on to each other like a haphazardly stacked pile of Lincoln Logs. Often the entire joke is "That character just said a line from a different musical!" Ostensibly it is about playwright brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom writing the world's first musical on the recommendation of Nostradamus. Surrounding them is the actual William Shakespeare, here styled as a heartthrob boy band writer whom Nick hates for being more successful, Shylock, a Jewish moneylender who wants to break in to theatre, and Portia, a puritan who loves Nigel's poetry. There is a plot but it seems quite threadbare for a full-length musical. But the cusp of the show isn't really about the *story* per se. It's about dragging the proceedings along to the next musical or Shakespeare reference.
Meta Theatre is capable of examining the art form and highlighting it's victories and its shortcomings. Shakespeare in Love is at least clever in how it goes about its references and does seem to have a great respect and admiration for Shakespeare's writing. I would expect no less from Tom Stoppard. He wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Something Rotten doesn't seem to respect Shakespeare. It also doesn't really want to take to task some of the shortcomings of his work. It mostly wants him there because he's recognizable and synonymous with theatre. Ultimately, it's just there for cheap laughs.
Most of the show is just broad comedy. In fact, I would hazard that you've probably seen a form of every bit in the show somewhere before and the previous iteration was probably done better. And some of this repetition leads to some pretty uncomfortable places. The Puritan Leader constantly accidentally makes gay innuendos or feminine affectations. It's part of a joke of implying homophobes are actually closeted gay people. We saw a lot of this in Trump and Putin memes and it was already pretty worn out even in 2015 when Something Rotten came out. Shylock is a joke about the Jewish theatre producer trope, something which was already done better in Spamalot.
It's not high art but there are, at least, a few laughs to be had in Something Rotten! Though, I would say that having gotten to this lowest basest parody level of meta theatre we may have to declare the art form dead and find something new.
And within this paradigm, musicals are often 10-20 years behind straight plays. Musicals take even longer to become realized owing to the multiple talents that go in to writing them, their massive casts, sets, and so forth. All this to say, one of the major themes of theatre has become meta-theatre. Theatre about theatre. There are some interesting inspections of theatre and the people who do it like Moon Over Buffalo and A Company of Wayward Saints and it's gone on so long that there are an endless supply of middle schools plays to the tune of "Hijinks ensue as theatre kids put on a play." And so it is that musicals come to the tail end of the movement. We've had good examinations like Cabaret and A Chorus Line and now we have Something Rotten!
Something Rotten is a cavalcade of musical references piled on to each other like a haphazardly stacked pile of Lincoln Logs. Often the entire joke is "That character just said a line from a different musical!" Ostensibly it is about playwright brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom writing the world's first musical on the recommendation of Nostradamus. Surrounding them is the actual William Shakespeare, here styled as a heartthrob boy band writer whom Nick hates for being more successful, Shylock, a Jewish moneylender who wants to break in to theatre, and Portia, a puritan who loves Nigel's poetry. There is a plot but it seems quite threadbare for a full-length musical. But the cusp of the show isn't really about the *story* per se. It's about dragging the proceedings along to the next musical or Shakespeare reference.
Meta Theatre is capable of examining the art form and highlighting it's victories and its shortcomings. Shakespeare in Love is at least clever in how it goes about its references and does seem to have a great respect and admiration for Shakespeare's writing. I would expect no less from Tom Stoppard. He wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Something Rotten doesn't seem to respect Shakespeare. It also doesn't really want to take to task some of the shortcomings of his work. It mostly wants him there because he's recognizable and synonymous with theatre. Ultimately, it's just there for cheap laughs.
Most of the show is just broad comedy. In fact, I would hazard that you've probably seen a form of every bit in the show somewhere before and the previous iteration was probably done better. And some of this repetition leads to some pretty uncomfortable places. The Puritan Leader constantly accidentally makes gay innuendos or feminine affectations. It's part of a joke of implying homophobes are actually closeted gay people. We saw a lot of this in Trump and Putin memes and it was already pretty worn out even in 2015 when Something Rotten came out. Shylock is a joke about the Jewish theatre producer trope, something which was already done better in Spamalot.
It's not high art but there are, at least, a few laughs to be had in Something Rotten! Though, I would say that having gotten to this lowest basest parody level of meta theatre we may have to declare the art form dead and find something new.
March 12, 2022
Extremely funny musical with two very imbalanced acts however - Act I has all of the best songs and Act II doesn't have almost any good ones. There's a lot of funny references to other musicals and a lot of cool twists on how different aspects of Elizabethan England would play out in modern times, like Shakespeare being a rock star.
June 17, 2023
Saw this at the Camelot Theater in Talent, Oregon. Really great production, so much energy, and Shakespeare as a rockstar, common.
I guess, my only critique is that I thought Bea should have actually been called Portia, since she actively argued for her husband Nick Bottom to not be beheaded. I get that she was meant to be a standin for Beatrice, but I think it might have worked better if switched.
I guess, my only critique is that I thought Bea should have actually been called Portia, since she actively argued for her husband Nick Bottom to not be beheaded. I get that she was meant to be a standin for Beatrice, but I think it might have worked better if switched.
July 12, 2022
I had fun.
April 12, 2025
Logging this because seeing a production is basically listening to an audiobook right
May 1, 2025
I was in the show so yeah 😍😍😍💖💖💖
April 5, 2025
Not this! This is fresh and funny!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews