THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, September 19, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Angela Yamarone PAGES: 20, including this page

September 15, 2016

‘Something Rotten!’ to Close in January By Andrew R. Chow

Brian d’Arcy James, left, and Brad Oscar in the musical “Something Rotten.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Broadway musical “Something Rotten!,” nominated for 10 Tony awards, will close on Jan. 1 after a strong but not spectacular 742-performance run. The show, which opened in April 2015, centered on two Elizabethan playwrights who, in trying to compete with William Shakespeare, end up pioneering musical comedy. Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick wrote the music and lyrics; Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell wrote the book; Casey Nicholaw directed and choreographed. After “An American in Paris” closes in October, “Something Rotten!” will be the last musical standing from its season. Ticket sales have recently slowed: the show grossed $524,945 this week. It regularly topped $1 million per week during the summer of 2015, following its bounty of Tony nominations, though only Christian Borle, as the preening Shakespeare, took home a prize. Kevin McCollum, the lead producer, said the show is “on its way” to recouping its initial investment, and that touring will provide additional income. A national tour will begin Jan. 17 at the Boston Opera House.

September 19, 2016

Review: In ‘What Did You Expect?,’ a Potluck of Election-Year Anxiety

By Ben Brantley

The Gabriels are as worried as you are. As one of them says, with a matter-of-factness that suggests long and weary acquaintance with a troublesome state of being, “People are scared. Everyone I know is scared.”

Sometimes, though, there’s blessed comfort in being with people who share your anxieties. Even if — or perhaps especially if — what’s on their minds is one of the last things they talk about directly.

Watching “What Did You Expect?” at the Public Theater, you’re always aware of what characters, caught in the middle of a presidential election that seems almost too surreal and too important for words, are thinking. And you can tell how those thoughts inform every joke, sigh and anecdote that comes out of their mouths.

Embodied by a six-member cast that interacts with the chafing ease of real blood relatives, the title clan of Richard Nelson’s “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family” has returned to offer us a mirror of our frightened, fallible selves at this very fraught moment in American history. Directed by its author, “What Did You Expect?” is the second work in the second cycle of plays by Mr. Nelson that have quietly emerged as a sui generis triumph of civic theater.

Like Mr. Nelson’s “The Apple Family Plays,” a tetralogy staged at the Public from 2010 to 2013, “The Gabriels” is set on the night the production opened (Friday, Sept. 16) in the small but increasingly fashionable riverside town of Rhinebeck, N.Y. The Gabriels share many traits with the Apples, including an interest in the arts and a tendency to channel tension through the preparation of food.

But though two cast members here also appeared as Apples — the marvelous Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders — the Gabriels are very much their own people. For one thing, they aren’t as well-off financially as the Apples. And there’s no use pretending that such economic differences don’t define their dealings with the world and one another.

Sure, they have a cozy village home that has been in the family for years, where Mary Gabriel (Ms. Plunkett), a retired doctor, resides after the death of her husband, Thomas, a playwright. But recently she’s had to take in a boarder, Karin Gabriel (Meg Gibson), an actress who was Thomas’s first wife.

Is also seems more than likely that this old house, which turns out to be mortgaged to the hilt, is going to become increasingly crowded in the near future. Patricia (Roberta Maxwell), Thomas’s mother, will probably have to leave the retirement home where she’s been living. And George (Mr. Sanders), Thomas’s brother, and his wife, Hannah (Lynn Hawley) may well have to sell their own place in the village and move back here.

These prospective changes are one of the reasons for this suppertime gathering of the Gabriels, who also include Joyce (Amy Warren), a costume designer who lives in Brooklyn. The extent of the family’s financial distress is

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revealed only by degrees. The Gabriels don’t know a lot about money, and they have never before had to think about it quite so much or with such apprehension.

“What Did You Expect?” wears its topicality with modest stealth. Its subjects are those that daily fill Op-Ed pages and pundit TV in a Babel of aggrieved and defensive voices: The acridness of the presidential race, an American populace that’s no longer sure of its identity and the yawning gap between the very rich and everybody else.

It is a testament to Mr. Nelson’s well-honed craft, and that of his cast, that these topics are seldom addressed directly yet are embedded in the play’s every fragment. His family cycles inhabit the here and now with an unobtrusive thoroughness I’ve never encountered elsewhere in the theater.

And make no mistake: “What Did You Expect?,” like its predecessors, is very much a work of theater. It trades gently and profitably in the present-tense intimacy between performers and audience in a small space and finds in the art of playacting a map of how we live our lives.

Designed by Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton and sound by Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens, the kitchen set is first seen as an anonymous space. Then the cast members arrive, bearing plates of food and boxes of papers and photographs.

In a twinkling, the kitchen assumes a richly detailed personality, the kind a room acquires over many years. And yet it has all materialized so fast. Which suggests it could disappear just as quickly.

That sense of transience is enhanced as the characters go through the letters, journals and books left by Thomas, reminders of both the late playwright and of people dead long before him. Thomas is still very present to Mary, in particular, and she is still periodically seized by the harsh awareness that he is no longer physically there.

Mary, the former doctor, is a stoic by nature and by training. But Ms. Plunkett’s marvelously open face lets us read every nuance of her character’s pain and longing. She is the play’s emotional hearth. Yet every performance here glows with a compelling, specifically embodied mixture of trepidation and hope, as the characters bicker and cosset, obliquely assigning blame and offering support.

They talk about the habits of rich people (the influx of that tribe into Rhinebeck has allowed them new observational opportunities); about the family piano on which George gives lessons to local children; and about everyone’s instinctive aversion to what’s happening on the great political stage, which Joyce says makes her feel “just filthy.”

Feelings of personal loss, of vacuums left behind, shade into public fears that in turn are absorbed, as in Chekhov, into a quiet sense of life as a bewildering mirage. “’Who are we?’” says Mary, toward the play’s end, quoting her husband. “I think we should all be asking that. ‘Is this really our country?’”

At the beginning of “What Did You Expect?,” Karin is reading aloud from a French play translated by Thomas. It describes a set in which two men, standing outside, look through a window at a family going about their nightly rituals. Tragedy awaits this family; unbeknownst to them, the daughter of the house has just drowned.

There is a special sanctity in the last, quotidian moments before this horror is revealed. Mr. Nelson’s play isn’t nearly as stark or melodramatic as this one appears to be. Yet it’s hard not to identify with the unnamed observers, watching people much like ourselves, provisionally cocooned in a warm, well-lighted nest within a thick and far-reaching darkness.

September 17, 2016

Review: ‘Crackskull Row,’ an Irish Gothic With Masher, Basher and Rasher

By Andy Webster

You might expect the 2016 edition of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival to kick off with an upbeat paean to Ireland. Instead we have Honor Molloy’s grotesque but richly satisfying drama “Crackskull Row,” at the Theater Workshop.

This production, from the troupe the Cell, is a piece of Irish gothic; other practitioners include Conor McPherson, a specialist in haunting conversations, and Martin McDonagh, the poet of dark comedy. Now Ms. Molloy enters the ring, exploring rage, dissolution, sexual perversity and family history with a bleak and penetrating acuity.

It begins in 1999, with faint traditional music and a convict (Colin Lane) who recalls his upbringing. And then we are in a home of pronounced decay: papers strewn on the floor, a fetid sink, wood slats peeking behind crumbling drywall. (The wonderfully decrepit set is by Daniel Geggatt and Caitlyn Murphy.) Flopped on the couch is Masher Moorigan (the assured stage veteran Terry Donnelly), an aging, brittle woman who’s had better years. She has a visitor — or is it a visitation? — in Dolly (Gina Costigan), who bathes Masher’s feet and speaks ruefully of Masher’s family.

Flash back to 1966, when Dolly, a slatternly go-go dancer, is living with her teenage son, Rasher (John Charles McLaughlin), who supplies perhaps the only genuine affection and intimacy Dolly has ever known. As for Rasher’s father, Basher (also Mr. Lane), he is a drunken, violent, hotheaded musician gone for days on end, playing for pints and maybe hobnobbing with republican vandals. Amid his frequent absences, Dolly and Rasher enter into an Oedipal romance that cannot end well.

Basher shows up, full of sodden bluster, with a sword he has salvaged from the remains of Nelson’s Pillar (an actual British monument in Dublin blown up, probably by I.R.A. dissidents, on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising). Tempers erupt, identities are disclosed, and the unique relationship between Dolly and Masher is revealed.

The performers, directed by Kira Simring (the Cell’s artistic director), are uniformly on point, with a grizzled Mr. Lane and a disheveled Ms. Donnelly especially fine. Siena Zoë Allen’s costumes, drab but with bursts of color and pattern, complement the glowing hues in Gertjan Houben’s lighting. But it is Ms. Molloy’s salty, slangy yet singsong dialogue that most resonates. Mr. McPherson and Mr. McDonagh might have to set another place at their table.

“Crackskull Row” continues through Sept. 25 at the Workshop Theater, 312 West 36th Street, Manhattan; thecelltheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

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September 17, 2016

Edward Albee, Trenchant Playwright for a Desperate Era, Dies at 88

By Bruce Weber

Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died Friday at his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 88.

His personal assistant, Jakob Holder, confirmed the death. Mr. Holder said he had died after a short illness.

Mr. Albee’s career began after the death of Eugene O’Neill and after Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had produced most of their best-known plays. From them he inherited the torch of American drama, carrying it through the era of Tony Kushner and “Angels in America;” August Wilson and his Pittsburgh cycle; and into the 21st century.

He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, “The Zoo Story,” opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench.

When the play came to the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village the next year, it helped propel the blossoming theater movement that became known as Off Broadway.

In 1962, Mr. Albee’s Broadway debut, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play, ran for more than a year and half and enthralled and shocked theatergoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink.

The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, turned the play into Mr. Albee’s most famous work; it had, he wrote three decades later, “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort — really nice but a trifle onerous.”

But it stands as representative, too, an early example of the heightened naturalism he often ventured into, an expression of the viewpoint that self-interest is a universal, urgent, irresistible and poisonous agent in modern life — “There’s nobody doesn’t want something,” as one of his characters said — that Mr. Albee would illustrate again and again with characteristically pointed eloquence.

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A half-century later, Mr. Albee’s audacious drama about a love affair between man and beast, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” won another Tony, ran for nearly a year and staved off the critical despair, however briefly, that the commercial theater could no longer support serious drama.

In between, Mr. Albee (his name is pronounced AWL-bee,) turned out a parade of works, 30 or so in all, generally focused on exposing the darkest secrets of relatively well-to-do people, with lacerating portrayals of familial relations, social intercourse and individual soul-searching.

As Ben Brantley of The New York Times once wrote, “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”

His work could be difficult to absorb, not only tough-minded but elliptical or opaque, and his relationships with ticket-buyers, who only intermittently made his plays into hits, and critics, who were disdainful as often as they were laudatory, ran hot and cold.

In 1965, after “Tiny Alice,” his drama about Christian faith, money and the ethics of worship opened on Broadway, causing much consternation and even outrage among critics who had failed to discern meaning in its murky symbols and suggestions of mysticism, Mr. Albee attended anews conference ostensibly to discuss the play but ended up lecturing on the subject of criticism.

“It is not enough for a critic to tell his audience how well a play succeeds in its intention,” he said; “he must also judge that intention by the absolute standards of the theater as an art form.” He added that when critics perform only the first function, they leave the impression that less ambitious plays are better ones because they come closer to achieving their ambitions.

“Well, perhaps they are better plays to their audience,” he said, “but they are not better plays for their audience. And since the critic fashions the audience taste, whether he intends to or not, he succeeds each season in merely lowering it.”

Several of his plays opened abroad before they did in the United States, and his work was often more enthusiastically welcomed in Europe than it was at home; even some of his most critically admired plays never found the wider audiences that only a Broadway imprimatur can attract.

“Maybe I’m a European playwright and I don’t know it,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1991, adding: “Just look at the playwrights who are not performed on Broadway now: Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet. Not a one of them.”

Never a Critic’s Darling

A clever speaker in interviews with a vivid sense of mischief and the high-minded presumption of an artist, Mr. Albee was wont to confront slights rather than dismiss them, wielding his smooth, sardonic wit as a verbal fly-swatter. “If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic,” he said in 1988.

Referring to the “hysterical, skirt-hiking appal-dom” of critics after his 1983 play “The Man Who Had Three Arms” opened (and quickly closed) on Broadway, he said: “You’d have thought it was women seeing mice climb up their legs.”

And yet he was among the most honored of American dramatists. Beyond his Tonys — including one for lifetime achievement — he won three Pulitzer Prizes.

His major works included “A Delicate Balance,” a Pulitzer-winning, darkly unsettling comedy about an affluent family whose members reveal their deep unhappiness in shrewd and stinging verbal combat; “All Over” (1971), directed on Broadway by John Gielgud and starring Colleen Dewhurst, about a family (and a mistress) awaiting the deathbed expiration of an unseen, wealthy man; “Seascape” (1975), another Pulitzer winner, a creepily comic, slightly ominous meditation on monogamy, evolution and mortality that develops from an oceanside discussion involving an elderly human couple and a pair of anthropomorphic lizards; and “Three Tall Women,” a strikingly personal work drawn from memories of his adoptive mother, scrutinizing, in its various stages, the life of a dying woman. The play had its 1991 premiere in Vienna but earned Mr. Albee a third Pulitzer after it appeared Off Broadway in 1994.

A subsequent work, “The Play About the Baby,” opened in London in 1998 and in Houston in 2000 before finding its way the next year to Off Broadway in New York. In it Mr. Albee revisited, in a more abstract form of harrowing comedy, notable rudiments of “Virginia Woolf,” namely an older couple initiating a younger couple into the grim realities of later life and a child whose existence becomes a matter of ardent and anguish-inspiring discourse.

“Albee is not a fan of mankind,” the critic John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “The friendships he stages are loose affiliations that serve mostly as a bulwark against meaninglessness.”

‘Plays Are Correctives’

Mr. Albee explained himself as a kind of herald, perhaps a modern Cassandra warning the theatergoer of inevitable personal calamity.

“All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done,” he said in the 1991 Times interview. “I find most people spend too much time living as if they’re never going to die.”

He wrote, he said, with a sense of responsibility; “All plays, if they’re any good, are constructed as correctives,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “That’s the job of the writer. Holding that mirror up to people. We’re not merely decorative, pleasant and safe.”

Mr. Albee was born somewhere in Virginia on March 12, 1928. Little is known about his father. His mother’s name was Louise Harvey; she called him Edward. In the 1999 biography, “Edward Albee: A Singular Journey,” the author, Mel Gussow, a former reporter and critic for The Times, cited adoption papers — filed in Washington within days of his birth — that said the father “had deserted and abandoned both the mother and the child and had in no way contributed to the support of the child.”

Sent to an adoption nursery in Manhattan before he was three weeks old, baby Edward was placed with Reed Albee, an heir to the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters, and his wife, Frances, who lived in Larchmont, N.Y. The couple had no children and formally adopted Edward 10 months later, naming him Edward Franklin Albee III after two of his adoptive father’s ancestors.

Patrician and distant, the Albees were unsuited to dealing with a child of artistic temperament, and in later years Mr. Albee would often recall an un-nourishing childhood in which he felt like an interloper in their home. In a 2011 interview at the Arena Stage in Washington with the director Molly Smith, he said that his mother had thrown out his first play — he described it as “a three-act sex farce” — which he wrote at age 14.

“I think they wanted somebody who would be a corporate thug of some sort, or perhaps a doctor or lawyer or something respectable,” he told the television interviewer Charlie Rose. “They didn’t want a writer on their hands. Good God, no.”

In interviews he said he knew he was gay by the time he was 8, that he began writing poetry at 9, that he had his first homosexual experience at 12 and that he wrote a pair of novels in his teens — “the worst novels that could ever be written by an American teenager.”

His education was a hopscotch tour of the middle Atlantic: He attended Rye Country Day School in Westchester County, N.Y., the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania and finally the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut, from which he graduated.

He attended Trinity College in Hartford but never finished, reportedly because he refused to go to chapel and was expelled. Then, in 1949, he moved to Greenwich Village, where his artistic life began in earnest. His circle, made up of painters, writers and musicians, included the playwright William Inge and the composers David Diamond, Aaron Copland and William Flanagan, who became his lover.

The Off Broadway theater was nascent, and he began attending plays in the Village — “You could go to the theater for a dollar!” he recalled — seeing the works of Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello and Brecht and supporting himself with menial jobs.

Poetry as a Dead End

His own writing was less than successful — he tried short stories and gave them up — and though he published a handful of poems, he gave that up, too, when he was 26, because, as he put it to Ms. Smith, “I remember thinking, ‘Edward, you’re getting better as a poet, but the problem is you don’t really feel like a poet, do you? You feel like someone who is writing poetry.”

He added: “I knew I was a writer and had failed basically at all other branches of writing, but I was still a writer. So I did the only thing I had not done. I wrote a play. It was called ‘The Zoo Story.’ ”

It was a month before his 30th birthday, Mr. Gussow wrote in his biography, that Mr. Albee sat down at a typewriter borrowed from the Western Union office where he worked as a messenger, and completed “The Zoo Story” in two and a half weeks.

“I’ve been to the zoo,” the character Jerry says, in the opening line, approaching Peter, who is sitting on a bench reading. “I said I’ve been to the zoo. Mister, I’ve been to the zoo!”

Mr. Diamond helped arrange the Berlin production — in German translation (“Die Zoo-Geschichte”) — and it was well-received. But in New York the play was rejected several times before the Actors Studio agreed to stage a single performance; afterward, Norman Mailer, who was in the audience, declared it “the best one-act play I’ve ever seen.”

When “The Zoo Story” opened for a commercial run at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 1960, reviews were mixed. (The Times’s Brooks Atkinson called it “consistently interesting and illuminating — odd and pithy,” though he concluded that “nothing of enduring value is said.”)

Even so, the play made enough of a splash that Mr. Albee became known as an exemplar of a new, convention-defying strain of playwriting. In an article in The Times with the headline “Dramatists Deny Nihilistic Trend,”

Mr. Albee espoused the view that would become his credo: that theatergoers should be challenged to confront situations and ideas that lie outside their comfort zones.

“I want the audience to run out of the theater — but to come back and see the play again,” he said.

‘A Sick Play’

His next three plays, also one-acts, were also successes Off Broadway: “The Sandbox” and “The American Dream” were portraits of family dynamics etched in acid, and “The Death of Bessie Smith,” which bordered on uncharacteristic agitprop, was about an incident (later revealed to be untrue) in which the great blues singer of the title, who died after an auto accident, had been turned away from a whites-only hospital.

Then came “Virginia Woolf.” Focusing on George and Martha, an embittered academic couple — he’s a history professor, she’s the college president’s daughter — it presents a boozy late-night encounter between them and two campus newcomers, Nick and Honey, a young math teacher and his wife, which devolves into a series of horrifying, macabre psychological games, cruel challenges and spilled secrets.

The reactions were virulent and disparate. Some critics were appalled:

“A sick play for sick people,” The Daily Mirror declared.

“Three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep,” said The Daily News.

But others were mesmerized and dazzled. A jury awarded it the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer advisory board rejected the recommendation, choosing not to give an award for drama that year; the jurors resigned in protest.

In the years since, as the play has grown to become a classic of modern drama and been revived on Broadway three times, most recently in 2012 with Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha, it has continued to incite controversy. Some critics and directors interpreted the play as being about four homosexual men, a suggestion that distressed Mr. Albee enough to seek legal remedies to shut down productions of the play with all-male casts.

As for the title, another item of speculation, Mr. Albee explained its origin in an interview in The Paris Review in 1966:

“There was a saloon — it’s changed its name now — on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place, that was called something at one time, now called something else, and they had a big mirror on the downstairs bar in this saloon where people used to scrawl graffiti. At one point back in about 1953 … 1954, I think it was — long before any of us started doing much of anything — I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s … afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.”

Mr. Albee’s other plays include adaptations of the Carson McCullers novella “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”; of “Malcolm,” a novel by James Purdy, and of Vladimir Nabokov’s great novel of sexual obsession, “Lolita.”

He was also involved in one of the great flops in Broadway history, becoming a script doctor for the producer David Merrick’s 1966 staging of the musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,”

which starred Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain and closed on Broadway before it opened, after its fourth preview.

Mr. Albee was especially productive through the 1960s and early ’70s, when he was working as a team with the producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. But following his early successes, ending with “Seascape” in 1975, he went into a decline, partly owing to struggles with alcohol, and for nearly 20 years he did not write a commercially successful play.

Success Before Sunset

“The Lady from Dubuque” (1980), a drama concerned with the nature of identity and shadowed by the specter of death — it opens with a game of 20 questions, one of whose participants is terminally ill — was savaged by the critics and closed after 12 performances on Broadway. A similar fate befell “The Man Who Had Three Arms” (1983), a bilious discourse on the wages of evanescent celebrity.

Mr. Albee lived for several decades in a TriBeCa loft filled with African sculptures and contemporary paintings by the likes of Vuillard, Milton Avery and Kandinsky. His partner of 35 years, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died in 2005. Mr. Albee leaves no immediate survivors.

It was “Three Tall Women” in the early 1990s that returned Mr. Albee to prominence, and for the next 20 years he continued to be productive, turning out provocative work, including “The Goat” and “The Play About the Baby,” and witnessing (or directing himself) revivals of earlier plays on Broadway and in regional theaters.

He was riding this sunset success — and continuing to write — when he spoke to Ms. Smith in front of an audience at the Arena Stage in Washington, which was then presenting a festival of his work that included readings and performances of more than 20 plays. He recalled the feeling he had at the very beginning of his career, after he had finished writing “The Zoo Story.”

“For the first time in my life when I wrote that play, I realized I had written something that wasn’t bad,” he said. “‘You know, Edward, this is pretty good. This is talented. Maybe you’re a playwright.’ So I thought, ‘Let’s find out what happens.’ ”

Correction: September 16, 2016

An earlier version of this obituary included an incorrect year for the revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that starred Tracy Letts and Amy Morton. It opened in 2012, not 2013.

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September 15, 2016

'Something Rotten!' to End Broadway Run By David Rooney

'Something Rotten!' Courtesy of Boneau Bryan Brown

The irreverent musical comedy set in Shakespeare's time will close at the St. James Theatre in January, prior to launching its national tour in Boston that same month.

Following two years of skewering Shakespeare and time-traveling back to the imaginary birth of the musical comedy, Something Rotten! will conclude its Broadway run Jan. 1 at the St. James Theatre, before heading out on a national tour.

Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (Aladdin, The Book of Mormon), the show features a score by Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick and a book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell, all of them Broadway newcomers.

After scrapping initial plans for a Seattle tryout in favor of opening directly on Broadway, Something Rotten! began performances at the St. James March 23, 2015, and officially opened April 22 of that year to generally favorable reviews.

It received ten Tony nominations, including best musical, winning for Christian Borle's scene-stealing featured role, portraying Shakespeare as a preening glam-rock idol, adored by the masses.

Set in 1590s England, the show depicts the struggles of brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom to conquer a theatrical market dominated by the Bard. Their luck changes when a soothsayer foretells a theatrical future in which players will sing, dance and act at the same time, giving rise to a delirious number called "A Musical," which spoofs too many landmark shows to count.

Lead producer Kevin McCollum confirmed that the show has not yet recouped its $14 million investment, though profitability is likely to come when it hits the road.

"Something Rotten! is on its way to recoupment and we will know more when we close the initial run," said McCollum. "Income will continue to flow from licensing and touring for many more years to come."

The production was a solid seller through its first year, frequently grossing more than $1 million a week. However, sales have begun slipping in recent months. Its cumulative box office stands at $62.5 million, with 738,359 admissions. The U.S. national tour officially kicks off at the Boston Opera House, opening Jan. 17.