Ben Holmes and Alex Ryser in Quad City Music Guild's “Something Rotten!” at the Prospect Park Auditorium -- June 10 through 19.
Friday, June 10, through Sunday, June 19
Prospect Park Auditorium, 1584 34th Avenue, Moline IL
With Time Out NY describing the entertainment as “Broadway's funniest, splashiest, slap-happiest musical comedy in at least 400 years,” Quad City Music Guild opens its three-show summer season in Moline with the Prospect Park Auditorium's June 10 through 19 run of 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.”
Directing and choreographing Something Rotten! is Steph Delacy, the choreographer of such recent area presentations as Music Guild's Disney's Beauty & the Beast and the Spotlight Theatre's Matilda: The Musical, and her Shakespeare is portrayed by Andy Sederquist, a veteran of numerous Moline musicals including Little Shop of Horrors, Monty Python's Spamalot, and Mame. Other featured castmates include Rick Davis, Ben Holmes, Andy Koski, Joseph Lasher, Alex Ryser, Colleen Sederquist, Lauren Van Speybroeck, Jake Walker, and DeVonte Westley. Sixteen additional talents, meanwhile, compose Something Rotten's ensemble and troupe members: Nathan Bates, Anna Bourke, Susie Carsell-Schaechter, Alyssa Castro, Tim Dominicus, Mara Earp, Sara Laufer, Stephanie Moeller, Alex Owens, Marissa Pedersen, Val Pieper, Antoine Richmond, Caroline Sieren, Amber Whitaker, Daniel Williams, and Megan Winchell.
Delacy's assistant director is Music Guild veteran Sarah Lounsberry, with John Whitson serving as music director and Justin Lebo as assistant music director. And with Joe Miller acting as Something Rotten's stage manager, other members of the show's creative team include set designer Luke Vermeire, costume designer Aaron Westrum, lighting designer Robert Crist, sound designer Sean McGinn, props designer Lisa Ferguson, makeup designer Sue Cates, and producer Deb Shippy.
Something Rotten! runs at Moline's Prospect Park Auditorium June 10 through 19, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Admission is $11-16, and more information and tickets are available by calling (309)762-6610 and visiting QCMusicGuild.com.
