Broadways Something Rotten gets reinvented by Canadas Stratford Festival and its hysterical

What a joy it is to see “Something Rotten” transformed into something terrific. The caffeinated comedy, which played New York back in 2015, is the marquee musical of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, an easy trip for New Yorkers.And before this year, one would have had to search far and wide to find “Something Rotten” on any theater lover’s list of favorites.Talk about “all’s well that ends well” — the show of Shakespearean shenanigans has a sit-com’s supply of belly laughs.Really, it’s a north-of-the-border reinvention.What the Broadway musical needed, it turns out, was to schlep 500 miles away from 42nd Street to a 71-year-old festival that made its reputation with stagings of the Bard’s plays.Since the mid-aughts, Stratford’s musicals, earthier than ours, have gotten better and better.

New Yorkers will recall its “Jesus Christ Superstar” that played Midtown in 2011.But director Donna Feore’s “Something Rotten” is, by far, the funniest one I’ve seen there in 17 years.The show, with a score by Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick and book by John O’Farrell, is about a down-on-his-luck playwright named Nick Bottom (Mark Uhre), whose contemporary is unfortunately William Shakespeare — depicted as a swaggering Mick Jagger type by Jeff Lillico.Desperate for a big break of his own, Nick visits a soothsayer, Thomas Nostradamus (Dan Chameroy), a nepo baby trying to leech off his better-known uncle’s fame.

He’s a hack, but he makes at least one accurate prediction: The future of theater is, like it or not, musicals. His brilliant number, “A Musical,” is a struggle-to-breathe hysterical lampooning of “Les Miserables,” “A Chorus Line,” “Cats,” and a zillion more.Feore, a spirited choreographer who loves packing in nerdy easter eggs, includes visual nods to years of festival shows.

I didn’t recognize Chameroy, an actor I’ve watched many times, until I read the program at intermission.The hilarious guy, wh...