Pythons Return

This column from The National Review was written by Alex Massie.

The biggest buzz on Broadway this spring is flying around Eric Idle's new musical based, loosely, on "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Early indications are that Spamalot will indeed be the biggest hit of the year.

Variety reported that the show, which officially opens on March 17 at the Shubert Theater, grossed more than $700,000 in its first seven New York previews and tickets before June are already hard to come by.

Thousands of middle-aged men will wallow in the opportunity to wind back time to their bright college days of yore. Hopefully their wives will indulge them.

My guess is that it won't be a total burden for the fairer sex. Although the Python brand of humor is generally, and I think undeniably, a boy thing, if two Baltimore matrons new to the Python experience sitting beside me at one matinee were any indication, gray-haired ladies slightly beyond a certain age can enjoy themselves considerably at Spamalot.

At its best -- in the Holy Grail, the "Life of Brian," and some of the sketches -- the Pythons' world is one that, like P. G. Wodehouse's, cannot age. The sun will always shine on this Camelot. Like Wodehouse too, devotees risk boring their companions with endless chortling recitals of choice moments from the groups' greatest scenes. They, like the Pythons themselves, risk taking themselves too seriously.

That tendency to obsess -- to hail the Pythons as "important" comedy radicals when they were nothing of the sort, instead being part of a long British comedic tradition -- deadens the group's appeal. I know because I was nearly "meaning" in Python, endlessly thumbing through their collected scripts to deconstruct their purpose.

What a way to make a fool of oneself and unwittingly become the kind of bore the Pythons mercilessly mocked. That university courses across the English-speaking world should now "study" Python humor is proof that life imitates parody as frequently as vice versa.

Time, thankfully, should have rendered such exercises meaningless. From the moment King Arthur (played by Tim Curry) trots onto stage followed by his servant banging coconuts together to provide the sound of galloping horses, Spamalot is a joyous return to teenage pleasure.

The familiarity of such silliness is its own reward. The Knights That Say Ni, the Black Knight ("It's just a flesh wound"), and the crazed Killer Rabbit are all joyously present, each greeted with whoops of pleasure by the audience as they appear on stage. The Trojan Rabbit is there too: "Is it art?" No, "It symbolizes man's inner struggle with the universe." Indeed.

Python comedy perfectly illustrates the old saw that the best way to kill a joke is to explain it. After the Black Knight has been (impressively) rendered limbless, his arms are gathered by a monk wandering across the stage crying "Alms for the poor? Alms for the poor?" You either find this silliness funny or you don't.

Behind the silliness, however, the Pythons always had craft. It takes hard work for surrealism to succeed. Most of the time that's true of Spamalot too, even if there are too many gay jokes (Idle was always attracted to the group's smuttier side) and the show wobbles somewhat after the interval before rousing itself for a stirring finale.

In an attempt to provide some coherence to the show, Arthur and his knights are instructed by God (voiced by John Cleese) to make their way to Broadway where they must stage a musical to find the Grail.

This presents a problem since, as Sir Robin tells Arthur "You won't succeed on Broadway" unless, in a nod to The Producers, "you have some Jews." "If it isn't kosher, then no show sir." It's a perilous moment that the show just about gets away with, thanks largely to the panache with which this over-the-top silliness is presented.

This conceit allows Spamalot to poke fun at the conventions of musical theatre. The best of the new songs is a glorious parody of Andrew Lloyd Webber's saccharine scores, entitled "The Song that Goes Like This." It's the song that Idle says convinced the other Pythons to waive the veto each holds over Python spin-offs. Lloyd Webber, like many Python subjects, is an easy target for humor. But just because shooting fish in a barrel is easy doesn't necessarily mean the fish should remain unshot.

Curry plays Arthur as a mildly nag-dog but genial uncle figure, perplexed but beamingly amused by the ridiculousness of the situation he finds himself in, patiently explaining to his fellow knights that the Grail is "a metaphor. We must all look for the Grail within us."

His knights, Lancelot (played by The Simpsons's Hank Azaria), Sir Robin (David Hyde Pierce, "Niles" from Frasier), and Sir Dennis Galahad (Christopher Sieber) lend gallant support, "We're the Knights of the Round Table...we dance when'er we're able" and all that.

Curry, Azaria, and Hyde Pierce are established names. Less well known is Sara Ramirez but her performance as the Lady of the Lake is spectacular. Sexy, witty, and mischievous all at once, this is a breakout moment for Ramirez. Slipping from genre to genre with remarkable vocal dexterity she is Marlene Dietrich one moment, Cher the next, and always enchanting. Put your money on a Tony nomination at least.

It's all directed with great brio by Mike Nichols and there are dancing girls galore. Camelot is appropriately recast as Las Vegas (and yes, "what happens in Camelot, stays in Camelot") since like Vegas, Spamalot is a deadly serious financial exercise designed to offer an escape from everyday concerns while simultaneously acknowledging, indeed reveling in, the essential fakery of the enterprise.

In fact Spamalot is that rarity: a show as charming as it is knowing. Despite the digs at Lloyd Webber and the recurring pastiche of other musicals from Fiddler on the Roof to West Side Story, one of Spamalot's chief pleasures is its generosity. Parody and pastiche embrace rather than undermine their subject matter after all.

Spamalot is then, in some way, a celebration of musicals themselves and the theatre's ability to wash away life's troubles. After all, in a reprise lifted from "The Life of Brian," when you're feeling glum -- just look on the bright side of life.

That alone makes Spamalot more than just another lazy effort to earn cheap laughs and cheaper money from recycling 30-year old jokes. Spamalot demonstrates that the Pythons are far from extinct, they have not kicked the bucket nor shuffled off this mortal coil to join the choir invisible. And hurrah for that.

Alex Massie writes for the "Scotman."

By Alex Massie