In the early 2010s, Eric Holmes was an assistant on NBC's Smash under playwright and screenwriter Theresa Rebeck, the show's creator and co-executive producer who was infamously fired after season 1 amid creative differences with the team.

"I was filled with a little bit of rage over how women are treated in this industry and how all the male executive producers got away with it, and she was somehow the villain," Holmes recalled. From there, he said the idea for The King's Critique "organically came out because we were like, 'You know what? Women deserve an even bigger seat at our theatre table.'"

He and Nat Zegree wrote the show in under six months "and then threw it on a shelf," Holmes continued. In the meantime, they achieved recognition with another musical, Fly More Than You Fall, and decided to revisit The King's Critique as the themes of misogyny and inept male leadership got "upsettingly relevant culturally."

Despite the negative sides of the show's origin story, Holmes and Zegreee ultimately want The King's Critique to be a fun and positive experience. "We just wanted to write a story that was everything we absolutely love about theatre," Holmes said.

The King's Critique is (loosely) a period piece, so it made sense that the creators looked back — and in director Catie Davis's case, way back — to the classics. "What do we love about Shakespearean comedies?" she asked when she first came aboard. "We love the quick pace of it. We love the magical realism of it. We love characters who are cross-dressing in disguise, and everyone gets mixed up about who's who."

Holmes and Zegree looked a bit closer to the present, finding comic inspiration in 20th-century icons like Mel Brooks and Neil Simon. Their classic Broadway-style score also contains Easter eggs to a wide array of iconic theatre composers.

During the songwriting process, Holmes said he would tell Zegree, "'This should maybe sound like Kander and Ebb,' or 'This should sound like [Alan] Menken,' or 'This maybe is more [Stephen] Sondheim.'" And he would just do it.

"Not to say that he ripped any of them off," Holmes continued with a laugh. "To have the freedom to literally play in any style of musical theatre allowed the show to just be bigger and bolder than ever before." Choreographer Nancy Renee Braun said she took a similarly expansive approach dance-wise, incorporating styles from classic theatre to tap to hip-hop.

Shakespeare's plays aren't the only thing that influenced Davis; so did his Globe Theatre in London, at which theatregoers surround three sides of a thrust stage and the "fourth wall" between actor and audience is thin. That idea inspired the setup of The King's Critique, at which audiences face each other from two sides of a stage.

"I always find when I'm in a theatre like that, you get to watch a show, but it also feels like you're in it because you're watching the other audience watch the show, too," said Taylor Iman Jones, who stars as Josephine. "I'm excited that our show is going to have that sense of community surrounding it, literally."

And the action isn't confined to the stage, either, the actors teased. "There are some moments where actors may appear in places that are not on the stage," said Matthew Quinn, who plays the king's right-hand man Horace. "Always be aware of your surroundings because you never know where a performer may appear."

If there's one thing you can expect from The King's Critique, it's for it to be larger-than-life in every way. Jones described the costumes and dialogue as "a hodgepodge of regal and modern," while Justin Collette, who plays King Benjamin, even compared their sensibility to drag: "Big, over-the-top, hard-committed, archetypal characters delivering to the audience with your soul — that's drag, baby."

Some specific costume pieces to look out for: Sebastian's shorts (we don't know why, actor Sky Lakota-Lynch just said so) and Donna Lynne Champlin's belt stuffed with trinkets, props, and even some mid-show pick-me-ups.

"I'm going to have snacks in my belt," revealed the actress, who plays "maybe-a-witch" Cora. "Maybe you can see me passing little cookies or little Welch's Gummies." Yum!

That's according to Jones and Lakota-Lynch, who recommended their show for audiences looking for pure silliness. "I really enjoyed [Shucked] because it was like, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke," Jones said. "I didn't know what to expect, and I had such a good time."

Lakota-Lynch recommended The King's Critique for fans of the wacky Shakespeare spoof Something Rotten!, which similarly infuses a period story with contemporary humor. And he did share one thing you can expect from The King's Critique: "If you like fart jokes, this is the musical for you."

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