{"id":492,"date":"2007-09-13T15:38:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2007\/09\/13\/spamalot"},"modified":"2007-09-13T15:38:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-13T15:38:00","slug":"spamalot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/spamalot\/","title":{"rendered":"Spamalot"},"content":{"rendered":"

The touring company of Spamalot<\/span> is now in Salt Lake City, and, last night, my wife and I went to see it as part of a night out on the town.<\/p>\n

She loved it. I\u2019m far more ambivalent.<\/p>\n

I certainly had a good time, and there were plenty of laughs to be had. It was also fun to take in some live theatre. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen an actual musical since I left Tuacahn in 2004. And I was a theatre major! How pathetic is that?<\/p>\n

Still, I can\u2019t get over the feeling that the show, in my considered opinion, just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem was that the actor playing King Arthur was awful. Simply awful. He mumbled and smirked his way through the whole thing like some kind of warped Medieval Elvis, and you could only understand about every third word. Thankfully, I\u2019ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/span> over three billion times, so I already knew most of his lines.<\/p>\n

Which, of course, was another part of the problem.<\/p>\n

Huge chunks of this show are transplanted directly from the original movie, and these actors just can\u2019t hold a candle to Cleese, Palin, Jones, Idle, and even Gilliam. But the actor who you miss most of all is Graham Chapman \u2013 and not just because he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

For the first time, I realized that the primary reason the Holy Grail movie is so funny is that Graham Chapman is such a perfect straight man. He takes his role as Arthur absolutely seriously. He\u2019s regal; he\u2019s commanding; he\u2019s always in complete earnest. Playing Arthur that way is a completely thankless task, because everyone else gets all the funny lines. But without him, the movie falls apart. The French Taunter is hysterical, yes, but only because he\u2019s such a perfect contrast to Arthur and his fellow stuffed shirts. Same with the communist peasant and the Black Knight and the Knights Who Say Ni. (Especially the Knights Who Say Ni. In the movie, they\u2019re bizarre and strange, but only because Arthur provides a touchstone for normalcy. In the stage adaptation, they\u2019re just stupid \u2013 and not the good, funny kind of stupid. They\u2019re truly painful to watch.)<\/p>\n

Spamalot\u2019s<\/span> Arthur is just as jokey and silly as his antagonists, so all of the comic tension that made the movie so delightful is entirely absent. A better actor playing Arthur might have helped, but the whole tone of the musical is the antithesis of the original film. The movie takes place in a stark, cold, forbidding world infested with an inexplicable lunacy. The musical is none of those things. It\u2019s a Vegas lounge act. It has replaced stark with smarmy.<\/p>\n

And smarmy just isn\u2019t funny.<\/p>\n

Much of the difference is necessitated by the practical limitations of the stage vs. the freedom of film. When, in the movie, the French Taunter is standing on a castle a hundred feet above King Arthur, you know he\u2019s in a real castle. On stage, when the same taunter is about five feet above the knights on a wall on wheels, it\u2019s much harder to suspend disbelief, especially since it\u2019s clear that none of the actors believe in it, either. Worse, they seem to be satirizing their already silly source material, which just broadens the humor to the point of irrelevance.<\/p>\n

Spamalot<\/span> is at its best, then, when it leaves the movie behind and satirizes the conventions of musical theatre. The two best songs in the show are \u201cThe Song That Goes Like This,\u201d which mocks obligatory Andrew Lloyd Webber-style power ballads, and \u201cYou Won\u2019t Succeed On Broadway If You Don\u2019t Have Any Jews,\u201d whose satirical target is self-explanatory. Neither of these songs has any connection to the film, but both produced belly laughs, and they were, ironically, the elements of the show most reflective of the original Python sensibility. I also quite enjoyed \u201cI\u2019m All Alone,\u201d where Arthur laments his solitude while standing next to his increasingly frustrated servant, who resents being ignored.<\/p>\n

The show, to its credit, does a fairly decent job of cobbling together a plot from the disjointed set pieces of the film. The primary device they use to do this is the addition of a new character \u2013 the Lady of the Lake. Unfortunately, in this production, the actress playing the Lady was a flat-footed comedienne. She had a beautiful, legit soprano voice, but she didn\u2019t have the chops for all the soulful comic asides she was supposed to execute. Her silly number in the second act should have brought down the house \u2013 instead, it just brought the momentum of the show to a screeching halt. She would have made a great straight woman, though \u2013 a pity her part didn\u2019t call for that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really complaining. On the whole, I enjoyed myself. And my wife loved it. But next time I want to revisit Monty Python\u2019s Knights of the Round Table, I\u2019ll watch the movie instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thetouring company of Spamalot<\/span> is now in Salt Lake City, and, last night, my wife and I went to see it as part of a night out on the town. She loved it. I\u2019m far more ambivalent. I certainly had a good time, and there were plenty of laughs to be had. It was also ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}