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"Monty Python's Spamalot"
The National Theatre
Washington, D.C.
June 7 through July 9, 2006

By Christopher Correa
copyright ©2006, Christopher Correa

Keep your eyes fixed on his legs. The tipsy tattoo that only sounds eerily reminiscent of a hyperkinetic Donald O’Connor dance sequence appears to be coming from a stationary set of gams. There it is again: tappa, tappa, tappa. And still he stands, knackered by gravity and a rather (or “rah-ther”) British demurral to unwind and let loose. He looks even more surprised than we do when he discovers that his feet can talk the talk without having to walk the walk.

His name is Arthur, king of the Britons, and he quests France and England in search of the Holy Grail, without the aid of a horse to ride on. Instead, he shambles from place to place, accompanied by a trusty squire who claps hollowed-out coconut halves together to affect the clopping of hooves (and who, coincidentally, is responsible for the king’s ability to cut an audible rug without ever lifting a heel). Such is the overall tone of this brand-name production, hammily titled "Monty Python’s Spamalot". The show—like its protagonist—tends to just march in place, rely on reputation, and pass the hard work on to the company in tow.

And while canned ham is most definitely the plat du jour being served at the National Theatre, one gets the feeling that without the sweet and salty cast and crew, everything could go sour at any time. That "Spamalot" stays miraculously fresh—eschewing most comparisons to the far superior movies that first skewered life, death, religion, shrubberies, England, France, homosexuals, Jews, livestock, and Andrew Lloyd Webber in the mid-seventies—is a testament to the durability of everything onstage other than Monty Python (or at least Eric Idle, the lone member of that surreal British comedy troupe who contributed the libretto).

With "Spamalot" we get characters we’ve already seen (peerlessly) on film, songs we’ve heard snippets of in the movies or on the television show, and set pieces Python fans have dedicated to memory and reenacted for decades. So why do the laughs rumble through the audience all evening, and why does nothing else in Washington favorably compare (including the well-intentioned, damagingly self-conscious "Mame," now tooting its horn at the Kennedy Center)?

Thank the show’s overseers, notably Oscar and Tony Award-winning director Mike Nichols, and a ripping-good new choreographer named Casey Nicholaw. Nichols is directing somewhat anonymously here, and taking a page from King Arthur’s (Michael Siberry) playbook, leaving the tough stuff to his squire. Nicholaw is playing to an advantage, given that his is the only work on display that can be classified as original. A choreographer is all that was missing from the Python pantheon, and Nicholaw greets the challenge with gratitude and affection.

He begins with a ditty that seems to be grafted from another show, called “Fisch Schlapping Song.” A gaggle of Finnish fellas and their fillies do what looks like a delirious combination of an Irish jig and a square dance. They take turns slapping one another across the face with wet herrings and make diagonal formations that would give Susan Stroman a run for the money. Later, Nicholaw reanimates a cartful of corpses for the jaunty “I am Not Dead Yet.” You haven’t truly lived till you’ve seen a dead man walking, er, doing the Charleston.

He spoofs Jerome Robbins during one knockout scene by placing iterations of the grail atop the heads of the cast and plagiarizing the famous “Bottle dance” from "Fiddler on the Roof." Knights in tights, crouched and jackknifing their legs in tandem: so that’s what was missing from this number.

“Knights of the Round Table,” a Vegas-chintzy set piece, one of at least two enormous excuses for a dance break against a backdrop of blinking lights, neon-lined castles, and chorus girls dressed like chandeliers, serves no purpose other than to display ingenious variations on the Busby Berkeley spectacular. Arthur and his cohorts, Sir Robin (David Turner), Sir Lancelot (Rick Holmes) and Sir Dennis Galahad (Bradley Dean) frolic gamely into corkscrew and drawback patterns, while a friar and a flying nun execute a soaring, sweetly suicidal pas de deux. Put it this way—he grabs onto his partner’s ankle and wrist, and flings her around, in what figure skaters would consider a modified “death spiral,” until her habit resembles an airplane caught in a tornado.

There is a splashy eleventh-hour glitz fest titled “His Name is Lancelot,” which represents the coming-of-age and coming-out-of-the-closet of the brutish Lance, distracted by an errant arrow with an SOS attached to it. He falls in love with the sender of the message, only to find that his damsel in distress is actually a prince who refuses to marry. Lance’s awakening turns the stage into a parade of pelvis-pumps and arm twirls, all to a catchy samba beat. Peter Allen, for whatever reason, is the butt of the joke, as is every nightclub in South Beach, Florida.

“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” was originally a twinkly little dirge about pursuing optimism in the direst of circumstances. In Monty Python’s Life of "Brian," the song was whistled by an impossibly cheerful group of men who are nailed to crucifixes. Nicholaw, realizing that reproduction would be tonally false for a story reconfigured to (and later, a tribute to) Broadway standards, turns the song into a lemony ode, a la "Singin’ in the Rain." Bright, yellow umbrellas are integrated, giving the choreography a Silver Screen sheen.

But the real coup of the night comes from the uber talented Pia Glenn, playing the mythical Lady of the Lake. Her comic timing is the sharpest of the cast, and she can toss off a power ballad, mimicking Liza, Whitney, and the kids of American Idol in one fell swoop. Enter her (sigh) Laker Girls, a cheer squad employed to boost the egos of Arthur and his knights. Nicholaw again uses improbable imagery to his, and to the show’s advantage. The “Laker Girls Cheer” becomes a dizzy, ditsy fight song, filled with throws, clap routines and acrobatic flips and flops.

When "Spamalot" isn’t moving to a beat, it tends to stall altogether, as though it’s waiting for the next choreographic interlude to kick things back into gear. Monty Python, it would seem, only goes so far on the Great White Way. Most of the scenes lifted directly from the source material sound tinny and receive more guffaws during their setup than after their punch lines. And stage magic can’t approximate what a shoestring budget and creative silliness did with the Killer Rabbit and the French Catapult effects in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." What we get here looks expensive but cheap, and the humor is lost with the strident translation. The music is incidental; Idle and John Du Prez have lightly hung a half-dozen songs on the scaffold of a plot, if for no other reason than to qualify their show as a musical comedy, and not just a comedy.

The legendary Mike Nichols turns out to be more of a feather in the show’s helmet than the ideal orchestrator of inanity and chaos. Evidence of his unparalleled ringmaster work on the film "The Birdcage" is in short supply this go around. It is Casey Nicholaw who deserves the credit for Spamalot’s success. He is solely responsible for taking a comic warhorse, and getting the old hoofer to trot.

Volume 4, No. 23
June 12, 2006
copyright ©2006 Christopher Correa
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