Monty Python’s Flying Circus always exceeded the sum of its parts. Their debut, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was as much a landmark in renegade filmmaking as it was an achievement in inspired silliness. Six young educated men with everything to prove, a scant budget, and yet seemingly not a serious care in the world crafted some of the most perfect farce ever captured on film.
Some of the finest moments in the original film (Terry Jones’s effeminate prince, the Camelot scene) were funny precisely because they skewered the inanity of musical theater. So how is it that someone (Erik Idle), or some persons (Erik Idle and Mike Nichols), thought that they could transpose Holy Grail into a musical without losing what was quintessentially brilliant about the original project?
The appeal of this massively hyped show lies completely in its billing: Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria, Mike Nichols, and Monty Python and the Holy fucking Grail. How could these components fail to add up to the good? They do, and in the most embarrassingly flat ways.
The show merely retreads all the cult-canonized routines from the movie, only without the magical timing of the original. It has the typical shortcoming found in a hollow cover of an Otis Reading tune: all the sugary hooks and none of the soul. They even felt the need to “Americanize†some of the dialogue – as if the American audience never understood that “filth†meant “mud†in the film – and tone the accents (in the original as varied and regional as an assortment of fine cheeses) down to bland “stage British.â€
The new songs are rarely amusing and instantly disposable. “The Song that Goes Like This†spends all the witty effect it will ever have within one listen (a trait which mirrors the sing-about-what-is-happening-as-it-happens gimmick of the lyrics). “His Name is Lancelot†runs with the Lancelot-is-really-gay joke several kilometers too far; Idle is unaware that the spontaneous-coming-out-number gag was already invented and mastered by fellow sketch-comedians The Kids in the Hall in their under-valued 1996 movie Brain Candy.
Alongside the new tunes, the established Python classics – “Knights of the Round Table†and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life†– seem like tasteless preaching to the eccentric choir, but they even manage to bungle these, too. The former is ruined by the decision to set it in Las Vegas’s Disney-version of Camelot, while they erroneously put the latter back into a sincere context when all its ironic bite originally derived by having it sung, in the final moments of their 1979 film Life of Brian, by a chorus of crucified men recently nailed to crosses. When Patsy (a character who remained likeably mute in the film) sings it earnestly to cheer up Curry’s Arthur early in Act II, Spamalot finally succeeds in becoming the very musical the Pythons so adeptly lampooned when they founded this cult in 1974.
The performances are, of course, immaculate. Songbird Sara Ramirez, who plays the new role “The Lady of the Lake†is the only genuinely fresh part of the show, with her arresting vocal acrobatics and spot-on comedic sensibility. Her ornate inflections and arpeggios, combined with her hilariously accurate facial contortions, aptly mock the parade of “divas†who top the charts and the Grammy awards (Christina, Alicia, Britney, Mariah). Pierce and Azaria are highly entertaining, but only as much as their parts allow them to be. Curry is wasted as the straight-man “King Arthur,†a role which only works if you have the crotchety and withdrawn spirit Graham Chapman.
Perhaps the show’s biggest misstep is its blundering attempt to ingratiate itself with New Yorkers. Giuliani and Sondheim references, a Gene Shalit gag, and a nearly-offensive song about needing Jews to make-it on Broadway. The play’s deus ex machina ending (far inferior to that of the film) even guides the plot to Broadway, in a cheek-tweaking “look at how clever we are for being post-modern/ self-conscious†moment that just makes your guts heave.
This is not a case of Python fanatics (and they are fanatical) being impossible to please, it is a case of undelivered goods. In trying to bridge the worlds of filmed/televised lunacy and musical theater, the writers came up with something which lacks the appeal of both, alienating both the Broadway enthusiasts and the Python-addicts. Spamalot is as undercooked a show as there has ever been.
The sad paradox is that the masterpiece Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made despite countless limitations – of time, of money, of experience – while Spamalot is a dud despite all the resources and talent imaginable.
The enthusiastic audience was ready to rip into applause the instant a recognizable bit from the movie hit the stage (and they were helped by meticulously reproduced costume design) or the instant one of the celebrity stars made his first appearance. While any active audience enhances the quality of live acting, it was far too obvious that they were merely thrilled by that with which they were already familiar. They were not applauding finely developed new comedic characters; they were really applauding Niles, Moe, Dr. Frank, and the guy who directed The Graduate. They were cheering not for the Trojan rabbit, the Tim the Sorcerer, or the Knights of Ni they had just seen, but for these icons as they exist in their memory of the film they love so much (to which they might just as well have bought tickets for that afternoon instead).
