By Eric Idle and John Du Prez.
A new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The publicist for Spamalot does appreciate the influence of Stage Whispers Magazine.
It's also sold out for months but he was prepared to ensure I received a House seat as long as I paid the market rate of $110 US.
Yes it is expensive but I would not have missed it for anything. My brothers and I spent many hours memorizing great swathes of the movie in our youth.
Alas for died in the wool Monty Python fans Spamalot is a little disappointing.
Yes the Black knight has his arms chopped off, the bunny rabbit decapitates the invaders, the knights say 'Neee' and brave Sir Robin still runs away but more often than not without the sharp edge of the original.
The main problem is that Tim Curry gave a flat performance as King Arthur. He had none of the passion of the original. It was like he was in second gear.
As for the script it was like a committee sat down and said how do we do a Disney version of this.
There is however lots of fresh material and much of it is very funny.
Much like a review through out the musical they start the adventure and send up the genre of Broadway musicals.
Andrew Lloyd-Webber cops heaps. There is a wickedly good song in which a giant chandelier drops down and the leading man and lady sing a song that ' starts in one key and ends in another just as they kiss.'
Eric Idle also notes that another secret to success on Broadway is to have a few Jews in it.
The send up of Fiddler on the Roof was a highlight for me.
But again I got the sense that the true Python spirit was kept on a leash.
In the program there is a hint of what might have been.
Eric Idle has written a spoof 'Message from God' - Just as it gets truly funny at the bottom the page it reads….'The rest of this page has been cut by producers'.
Here is taste of what he wrote.
Message from God.
'Hello many people assume that being God is an easy job. That you simply create a Universe and then sit around for 15 and half billion years being praised for it. But there is much more to it. Especially on Broadway finding backers, lunching with chorus girls…….Then there is the exhilaration of opening night - when you can show off to all your friends who haven't got jobs, the shoddy souvenir gifts from Producers….Okay it is hard on a wet Wednesday matinee with a half empty crowd of almost empty dead people not to wonder why you created a universe in the first place, and those actors they do go on and on, Do you like my hair style, shall I get my breast done and have you ever blown……