Something is rotten in the province of Ontario. It is the second number of the tentpole musical at Canada’s Stratford festival, the Shakespeare jamboree that has celebrated the British Bard of Avon for more than 70 years. This is a town where a street, a school and a pet hospital are called Romeo. But what’s that I hear? “God, I hate Shakespeare!” fumes the fellow on the revolutionary thrust stage of Stratford’s Festival theatre, asking how “a mediocre actor from a measly little town” managed to become “the brightest jewel in England’s royal crown”. The sacrilege rages on as the showboating Bard himself strides on to hog the spotlight for the song Will Power, and the “sultan of sonnets” brandishes a huge quill like a mic and shamelessly flirts with fans.
Bawdy, barmy and almost incessantly hilarious, Something Rotten! is the standout show of the 2024 Stratford season, fusing the festival’s two major traditions of Shakespeare and musical theatre. This Renaissance tale of budding playwright brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom (Mark Uhre and Henry Firmston), toiling in the shadow of the all-conquering Shakespeare (Jeff Lillico), picked up 10 Tony award nominations on its premiere in 2015 including best score (for brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick) and best book (co-written by longtime Guardian columnist John O’Farrell). Despite such success, it has inexplicably taken almost a decade for it to receive a UK premiere – but now a concert version will be staged for two nights at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in August.
It is perfectly at home in Canada’s Stratford – settled in 1832 and surrounded by farmland – which has a theatrical reputation to rival its British namesake. There are irreverent gags galore about musical theatre as the Bottom brothers take advice from a soothsayer who assures them it’s the next big thing – cue fond mockery in a brassy, high-kicking, dizzyingly meta number that breaks down the genre’s key ingredients with references to Les Mis, Annie and scores of other shows. A Hamilton-style rap battle finds rhyming couplets fired across the stage and the show has a touch of The Producers, too, as the Bottoms workshop the song The Black Death (opening line: “What’s that coming up the Silk Road?”) complete with a chorus line of grim reapers.
Like Upstart Crow, Something Rotten! interweaves elements from the original plays themselves in a tale of hidden identities and secret trysts as Nigel falls in love with Portia (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane), whose puritanical father harbours a barely concealed hard-on for theatre (Juan Chioran’s expressions are exquisite as he continually exposes his secret passions through unwitting innuendo). One standout scene has Nigel reciting poetry to Portia, which she receives orgasmically before he prematurely ejaculates the verse.
The production, directed and choreographed with gusto by Donna Feore, is performed by a cast beaming at the knowledge of how good this material is. It also neatly holds a mirror to other shows across the Stratford season. The plot has star-crossed lovers and there is a spoiler alert about Shakespeare’s latest hit, Romeo and Juliet, which one character in the musical goes to see. That tragedy is itself given a swoonsome outing for Stratford theatregoers by director Sam White on the same stage. At one point in the musical, Shakespeare disguises himself as one Toby Belch; Twelfth Night, directed by Seana McKenna with Scott Wentworth as the clubbable Belch, is also being staged at the Festival theatre.
Something Rotten!, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet are performed in rotation with matinee and evening performances; thanks to a crack technical team briskly handling the regular set changeovers, two shows can be seen on the same day. Such a double bill crystallises connections between the plays, but also allows a chance to see actors from North America’s largest classical repertory theatre ensemble take on a pair of roles back to back, such as the superb Jessica B Hill as both Lady Capulet and Viola.
McKenna’s Twelfth Night masters the required blend of mirth and melancholy, switching the story named for a final day of festivities to the dawn of the 1967 summer of love. The breezy hippy vibes chime with the “what you will” spirit of the play which is encapsulated by a remarkable piece of set design. Christina Poddubiuk has hung, above the stage, a mobile whose rods resemble oars (perfect for the coastal setting) and a family tree. It spins like Feste’s whirligig of time throughout the show, the shimmering components occasionally touching, as if percussion for the score which includes jazz, rock and folk. The show culminates in a whirl of movement combining elements of the locomotion, the hitchhiker, the jerk and other dance crazes.
Wentworth’s Belch appears with trousers rolled up, presumably straight from a dip in the sea, and delivers lines as if suffering from indigestion. Rylan Wilkie’s Aguecheek wears his hair long and resembles a befuddled Austin Powers. Together the pair trade dance moves in their “cut a caper” exchange. Deborah Hay’s Feste is a troubadour who dresses like Joni Mitchell, the “anything that’s mended is but patched” speech mirroring her hodgepodge outfit.
Amid this groovy ensemble is a female Malvolio (Laura Condlln), played as the ultimate square, with Condlln’s fussy gestures with her fingers akin to Tamsin Greig’s in the role at the National Theatre in 2017. It’s a superb physical performance, from her squatting as if urinating over Maria’s letter to admire its “great Ps” to some overeager thrusting of greatness. The physical comedy reaches a giddy peak when Aguecheek and Cesario bottle it during their boxing match.
Romeo and Juliet is similarly bolstered by smart musical choices. At the Festival theatre, all performances are signalled by the traditional fanfare played live outside the building by musicians with herald trumpets and a parade snare drum. Sam White’s production continues the beat with two drummers appearing on stage for a prologue sung by Juliet (Vanessa Sears) in flowing angelic robes and headdress – with extraordinarily intimate effect. The drummers reappear throughout, ratcheting the tension for fight scenes, the most shocking of which is Tybalt’s death as he is not slain by a blade but choked with his own necklace by Romeo.
Sears sings again when she meets cute with Romeo at the ball. Arias are introduced to the play, firmly set in the Italian Renaissance, including Dido’s Lament by Purcell, sung for Juliet by the Nurse (Glynis Ranney). It is a lovely addition, an alternative to the Nurse sending the wedding musicians away and allowing her a more reflective goodbye to her surrogate daughter than the customary shock of “woeful, woeful day”. That is emblematic of a version that explores all forms of love, romantic and familial.
White achieves a piercing clarity in a production that moves swiftly despite just minimal cuts to the text. Jonathan Mason’s Romeo works the front row with ease (“Show me a mistress that is passing fair,” he says with a wink, singling out a theatregoer) and I heard contented sighs behind me during the holy palmers sonnet. The bedroom scene is kind of wholesome: the pair dressed in billowing white on Juliet’s balcony for a brief moment of stillness before the tragedy careers towards its climax.
The third Shakespeare play this season is in Stratford’s smaller Tom Patterson theatre, where Cymbeline’s tale of doomed newlyweds becomes a chamber companion piece to Romeo and Juliet. Director Esther Jun finds smart solutions to some of the play’s trickier features, such as the introductory scene-setting by two gents, which can become laboured in the wrong hands. We hear whispered snatches of speeches from later in the play as the characters flood the stage for a group dance before freezing in a tableau, individually animated when introduced by the prologue.
Innogen is spiritedly played by Allison Edwards-Crewe, superb as Hero in last year’s feminist revision of Much Ado. Jordin Hall plays Posthumus Leonatus, Hero’s new husband, and shows the corrosive power of men’s locker room talk as he is egged into a wager with Iachimo (Tyrone Savage) about her fidelity. Jun has fun with the play’s fairytale archetypes: the wicked stepmother queen here becomes a weaselly Duke with a braided ponytail (Rick Roberts) while the villainous Cloten (Christopher Allen) is played purely for comedy as a preening, high camp narcissist, obsessively flicking his fringe from his face.
This kingdom of hyper-fragile masculinity is ruled, like Melly Still’s 2016 RSC version, by a female Cymbeline (Lucy Peacock). When Iachimo emerges from the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom, there is not quite the usual sense of threat but rather the impression of a man who flickeringly recognises his guilt and unworthiness in the presence of such purity. It all brings alive Innogen’s subsequent revelation: “I see a man’s life is a tedious one.”
Confronting tedium on the same stage is Sara Topham’s superlative Hedda Gabler in Molly Atkinson’s production of the Patrick Marber version first seen at the National Theatre in London in 2016. Ivo van Hove’s staging had staple-gunned bouquets and splattered tomato juice in a chic modern exhibition space, but the Belgian director’s request to Marber was that he write a script that would work equally as well if presented as a period piece. That is just what Atkinson does in a fiercely focused production that reveals just how well Marber has distilled Ibsen’s claustrophobic drama and captured the play’s black comedy.
“It’s enchanting to see you so early,” deadpans Hedda to her new husband Tesman’s aunt on her morning visit, and after this entrance Topham speaks volumes with just a raised brow or a narrowed eye in a finely detailed performance that foregrounds Hedda’s intelligence. Gordon S Miller’s Tesman is more ruddy than fusty, even doing a cartwheel and a jig at one point.
Never mind the pistols, each of the props – the aunt’s OTT hat, the punch, the precious manuscript – are weaponised against the other characters by Hedda. Marber’s version declutters Ibsen’s page-long stage directions about the drawing room, leaving a piano, fire, sofa and flowers. But Atkinson’s production – handsomely designed by Lorenzo Savoini – even gets rid of the instrument, which we hear being played instead. Each act concludes with the stylish note of a thriller, heightened by Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting.
The festival’s productions are traditionally given an annual overarching theme and this year’s is taken from Coriolanus: “a world elsewhere”. For Hedda, the notion has tragic implications, but in the festival’s traditional children’s show it is an opportunity for maxed-out fantasy and stagecraft. Ella Hickson’s Wendy and Peter Pan – first seen at the RSC in 2013 – is given a transportive production by Thomas Morgan Jones at the Avon theatre.
Hickson’s major alteration to the original story has a parallel in JM Barrie’s childhood. When he was six, his older brother David died in an accident and Barrie considered David to be frozen in time – a boy who wouldn’t grow up, like the novelist’s greatest creation. Hickson gives the Darling siblings another brother, Tom, who dies in an early scene and is taken to Neverland by Peter. Wendy unfairly blames herself and the children’s adventure is fuelled by a very personal quest for reunion with their own lost boy.
It raises the emotional stakes for a swashbuckler with fantastical panto trappings: Nestor Lozano Jr’s Tinker Bell costumed like a Christmas present, Jake Runeckles’ Peter whose hair flickers like flame, and Laura Condlln (again on excellent form) as Hook, assiduously booed before she has spoken a line. “I can see you out there,” she glowers to a boisterous audience, which includes children from the local Anne Hathaway school. But Condlln can silence them all like the strictest teacher by holding a single finger to her mouth – and her Hook is strikingly self-aware, offering insights on his own story and never reduced to a cutout villain. Later, we all bring Tink back to life with a round of applause – how’s that for giving a young audience agency?
The schoolchildren’s cacophonous response is matched by the Friday-night crowd for La Cage aux Folles at the Avon, with Steve Ross delivering a perfectly judged performance as Albin. Watching Thom Allison’s riotous yet profoundly heartfelt revival of Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman’s musical, I was reminded of a scene in Something Rotten! where Nick Bottom urges his company to ditch the idea of doing something deep and meaningful and put on a big old crowdpleaser instead. This festival proves, time and again, that both are possible at once.