How 3 Broadway Novices Wrote 'something Rotten!’

How 3 Broadway novices wrote 'Something Rotten!’ What would it have been like to be a fledgling playwright making a living at the same time as William Shakespeare? The result is “Something Rotten!” and all it took to get to Broadway was that original idea plus 40-odd songs, endless rewriting, a brief scare from an Oscar-winning movie, some top-notch actors and some two decades. The comedy is set during the Renaissance and portrays Shakespeare as an arrogant, rock-star playwright. Two brothers desperate to write a hit show in his shadow stumble on the notion of writing the world’s first musical. Wayne Kirkpatrick is a Grammy Award-winning songwriter of such tunes as “Change the World” for Eric Clapton and “Wrapped Up in You” for Garth Brooks. Work on the show was fitful and then threatened by the release of “Shakespeare in Love,” the 1998 film with Gwyneth Paltrow that portrayed a young Shakespeare stealing many of his best lines. The fledgling musical writers decided to keep going, mindful that any overlap would have to be cut. In 2010, Karey Kirkpatrick got in touch with an old pal, Kevin McCollum, a Tony-winning producer whose Broadway credits include “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “Rent.” (They had both worked at Disneyland years ago.) Kirkpatrick wanted to know how to pitch a musical. At a pitch meeting later that year, the brothers, after dinner with McCollum in which they explained their idea, sat down with him in Karey Kirkpatrick’s 10-foot-by-10-foot Los Angeles studio and played him five songs and handed him a treatment. A workshop version of “Something Rotten!” was shown in New York last fall, which went so well that a planned stop in Seattle to get the show ready for Broadway was dropped. The Kirkpatrick brothers and O’Farrell have since added three songs, moved one, corrected a lopsided first act, and sliced away at the script.