Rating: 3/5
Reviewed by: Ashley Frieze

Show seen in previews, March 7th.

Spamalot describes itself as “lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Playing at the Shubert theatre on Broadway in New York, it is next door to “Phantom of the Opera”, adjacent to “Fiddler on the Roof” and opposite Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”; the producers of this show are not joking – this is a big Broadway venture.

On the surface it looks like it should be a good show. The star cast, including Tim Curry (who played Frankenfurter in The Rocky Horror Show), David Hyde-Pierce (Niles from Frasier) and Hank Azaria (many of The Simpsons characters) is a big draw, as is the promise of seeing magical moments from the original Monty Python movie live on stage. Eric Idle and John Du Prez, who wrote a lot of the original and well-loved music from the Python back catalogue, also wrote the score for this show. Expectations were bound to be high among the Python-loving Americans, and people clamoured in vain for last minute tickets.

The show contains some of the songs from the Monty Python collection. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and “Knights of the Round Table” made very welcome appearances. The creative team also worked hard to bring us the scenes from “The Holy Grail” which you might not expect to see on stage. The bloodthirsty rabbit was amusingly recreated as a glove puppet; there was no pretence about this and the audience lapped it up. Similarly, the launch of a cow over the parapet of the French castle got the laughs it deserved. The cast made it all work, and made the most of their opportunity to pay homage to Python.

However, this is a deeply flawed show. Without Broadway production values and Eric Idle’s name on the credits, it would be nothing more than an uninspired student review. Aside from the well known songs, there’s nothing particularly memorable in the score, except for an often reprised song called “Find Your Grail”, which is probably only memorable as it is a bit too much like “Amazing Grace”. What makes a Python movie work is not what makes a stage musical work. The writers understood this and shoehorned a leading lady into the show, hoping to make it seem more like a musical. However, despite the best attempts of the leading lady to make something of her bizarre mishmash of a role – the Lady of the Lake, who turns out to be Guenevere and ends up marrying King Arthur – her talents are basically wasted, as there is no natural place for her in the story.

More unsettling and ultimately unsatisfying is the new material. Rather than further explore the Arthurian legends, or steal scenes from other Monty Python movies, the show relies on parodying other musicals for many of its laughs. In one scene, the audience realises that they’re seeing a cod-version of the sewer scene from “Phantom of the Opera”. The means of finding the grail is to “put on a Broadway musical” which goes a little into the territory of “The Producers”. They decide that they need to be more Jewish and a loving recreation of a scene from “Fiddler on the Roof” unfolds. Admittedly, this latter scene has one of the best gags in the show in it, but Monty Python was never about direct parody, so it seems unimaginative and unnecessary for Spamalot to feel the need to copy all of the shows in neighbouring theatres to fill the time. The audience members who spotted the one-line stolen from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” may have felt special, but did it make this a good show?

The audience enjoyed themselves. The cast and the show are undoubtedly going to receive much acclaim on the back of Monty Python's popularity, but Spamalot has nothing of its own to contribute to comedy or musical theatre. It has all been done before and better. My advice would be to go and see “The Producers” and watch “Monty Python and The Holy Grail” on DVD when you get home.

06 May 2005
Ashley Frieze