SOMETHING ROTTEN! – Opera House Manchester – until 19th July 2026

Review: 1st July 2026

Though it features a twerking Bard and a song called I Hate Shakespeare, this new comedy about his rival playwrights is too nice to be truly iconoclastic. That guy Shakespeare can really do it all – comedies, tragedies, histories, romances, sonnets, epics. Also, he can twerk. If you’ve ever longed to see the Bard of Avon shaking his ass, then speed to the Opera House Manchester, where you can catch him crammed into leather pants and a jaunty codpiece in Something Rotten!, the mildly amusing and oddly anodyne new musical comedy. This was the first show by the brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick to open on Broadway and that was back in 2015 and it still hasn’t made its way to London’s West End. Wayne’s second is Mrs. Doubtfire which did get a London opening.

The plot centres on Nick and Nigel Bottom (Jason Manford and Cassius Hackforth), a pair of Elizabethan also-rans. Shakespeare (Richard Fleeshman) gets the fame, the fortune, the girls. They get overripe fruit on a good day. Out of desperation, Nick consults a soothsayer (Cory English) and begs him to predict what Shakespeare’s next hit will be. The soothsayer, who may be mildly dyslexic, looks into the future and predicts the Tragedy of Omelette. Then he looks further and sees Cats and singing nuns. Armed with this foreknowledge and a couple of love interests, Nick and Nigel set out to put on this scrambled show – the world’s first musical. (Good thing the ancient Greeks aren’t around to sue for copyright infringement.)

Something Rotten! goes over easy. Too easy. The songs are catchy, but quickly digested (though the opening number Welcome to the Renaissance lodges in the head nicely). The climactic number, A Musical, packs in references to just about every theatrical hit from the past 50 years, and a couple of flops too. The book, co-written with John O’Farrell of Spitting Image, and lyrics settle for the undemanding laugh and usually get it. The performers are excellent, of course, with Manford strutting his song-and-dance stuff and Fleeshman channelling Mick Jagger, or maybe just Harry Styles. Tim Jackson’s direction and the choreography is reasonably entertaining, while Colin Richmond’s set draws the eye down alleyways and into windows and Rebecca Brower’s costume design is bold and full of personality.

But it’s hard not to wish that the show’s creators had the set the bar and the flame just a little higher. Something Rotten! wants to be uncouth and impertinent like The Book of Mormon, but it’s much too nice for that. The book and lyrics even excise all the obscenities, with heathens threatened with “you know where” and Shakespeare described as “freakin’ awesome”. It’s softly vulgar – but it settles for sweet when it ought to be scurrilous, comfortable when it ought to be really clever. It’s never offensive, but it’s never very exciting either. The closest it gets to iconoclastic is the song I Hate Shakespeare, a sentiment dear to the heart of most school kids (and George Bernard Shaw too).

In that song Nigel complains that Shakespeare “has no sense about the audience, he makes them feel so dumb”. There’s no danger of that here. But as the author of Omelette should know, audiences don’t need to be coddled either. This is a production that may make the West End, but is more likely to set out on a UK tour.