Saturday, September 22, 7:30 p.m.
Adler Theatre, 136 East Third Street, Davenport IA
With Time Out NY calling the show “Broadway's funniest, splashiest, slap-happiest musical comedy in at least 400 years,” Davenport's Adler Theatre opens its 2018-19 season of Broadway at the Adler performances with the September 22 touring production Something Rotten!, the zany, Tony-winning farce that the Hollywood Reporter called “a big, brash, meta-musical studiously fashioned in the mold of Monty Python's Spamalot.”
Something Rotten! welcomes audiences to the Renaissance of 1595, a period in which the Black Plague has ceded power to the Puritans; farthingales and codpieces are the latest fashion trends; and the biggest celebrity in England is a playwright named William Shakespeare. In the midst of all this excitement, however, brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom are trying to keep their acting company afloat. In a desperate attempt to out-Bard the Bard, Nick consults with a soothsayer, who informs him that the future of theatre involves acting, singing, and dancing – sometimes all at once! As the Bottom brothers strive to write the world’s very first “musical,” they find themselves caught in a bitter battle with the Bard, and wind up realizing that reaching the top sometimes means being true to thine own self … and all that jazz.
Boasting a book by John O'Farrell and Karey Kirkpatrick and music and lyrics by Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, Something Rotten! opened on Broadway in 2015 and enjoyed a run of 742 performances, receiving nine Tony Award nominations including Best Musical, Book of a Musical, and Original Score. The show also won the Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony for Christian Borle's turn as a rock-star William Shakespeare, with Something Rotten! amassing many of its season's most superlative raves. The Associated Press deemed the show “fresh and hysterical and irreverent … easily the funniest thing to arrive on Broadway since The Book of Mormon,” while the New York Post called it “a deliriously entertaining new musical comedy that is devilishly clever under its goofy exterior.”
Admission to September 22's 7:30 p.m. touring performance of Something Rotten! is $40.50-73, and tickets are available by calling (800)745-3000 or visiting AdlerTheatre.com.
