The musical Something Rotten opened on Broadway in March of 2015, ran for a respectable 742 performances, then headed out on a very successful national tour. I didn't see it in New York. During that period, I was caring for a sick friend here in L.A. and didn't leave the state. Many friends though told me they loved it and that I would too.
That proved to be true when the national tour reached the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles in November of 2017. I went, loved it and even tried to get tix to go back and see it a second time. Alas, by then the scalpers had gotten ahold of the remaining seats and I couldn't quite bring myself to pay three times as much for seats that seemed to be four or five balconies back from where I sat the first time…and in a theater with only two balconies.
A few months ago when I went up to San Jose to sign books, I treated myself to another viewing of Something Rotten. This is the second national tour which I believe is, unlike the first one, non-equity. It was good but not as good. At the moment, it appears that tour has ended. Looking at the lists of where those two tours roamed and for how long, I became very intrigued with how they manage to do it here one night and somewhere else two nights later. I wrote on this blog then…
Sometimes, I see a show like this and I can't help but think, "People this talented ought to be able to make a living doing shows without spending their lives on buses." The brutal life of Renaissance times they were singing about might be nothing compared to playing that show on a Wednesday night in St. Louis and getting to Muncie in time to do it on Thursday night there. How they pack all those sets, props and costumes and get them set up in the next town is beyond me.
But maybe some of those players enjoy the adventure. And maybe some of them feel as a friend of mine did when I asked her about a string of one- and two-nighters she did once in a roving caravan of Grease. She said, "I would rather live six months like that and get to perform almost every night than spend those six months doing office-temp work because I can't get a job acting in town."
At the Ahmanson, I was very impressed by the lead actor, a guy named Rob McClure who seemed born to star in musical comedies. He was musical and he was comedic and as I've researched him a bit, I find that he's always in one musical comedy or another. He's currently one of the stars of Beetlejuice on Broadway and when I asked one pal who knows him and had seen it, she said, "Oh, they don't give him enough to do. He's so much better than the show is." If Mr. McClure ever reads this, I hope he takes that as a compliment.
I also discovered something he did that I'd completely missed. While he was on that Something Rotten national tour, he produced a town-by-town video diary of the tour, taking us backstage and introducing us to all the players and showing us what it was like to be on that tour. He didn't really answer the question of how the stage crew people got the sets 'n' props 'n' costumes from one performing arts center to the next — that wasn't his department — but he showed us how the performers lived and what they did when they weren't on stage.
Embedded below is Part 1 of 17. Each episode runs around fifteen minutes so if you watch the whole thing — as I did, though not all at once — it'll take over four hours of your life. I found it was worth it and some of you will too, especially if you loved the show on stage. That's not required but it would help. I really enjoyed this more than some of the so-called "reality" shows I've seen on network-type television.
So here's the first of Rob McClure's reports from backstage, the length and breadth of America. If you enjoy it as much as I did, you should have no trouble finding your way to the other sixteen…