Word: spamalot
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...which Bill Oddie read the news: ?Good evening, here beginneth the news. It has come to pass that...' And I did the weather forecast: ?Over the whole of Egypt, plague followed by floods, followed by frogs, and then death of all the firstborn - sorry about that Egypt.'" (Spamalot echoes this in the historian's opening narration: "...In Mercia and the two Anglias: Plague. With a 50% chance of pestilence coming out of the Northeast at 12 miles per hour.") Eventually, Idle recalls, "I became the Grand President and changed the laws and admitted women" - Germaine Greer...
...When the show opened, Idle was exactly twice as old as he was when MP&HG was shot back in '74. If the old saying is true - that we become what we once mocked - then the Idle of Spamalot isn't too far from the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" pub character in the early Flying Circus days. He wants everyone in the theater to get it, get it? This is clear from the show's brief overture, with oompah tubas and tiptoeing xylophones practically poking the audience in the ribs to announce what follows will be musical comedy stopping just...
...encouraged to musicalize MP&HG after seeing Mel Brooks' stage version of The Producers. The was the show that reminded Broadway that its strong suit was musical comedy, and not the dour Les Miz and Phantom and Sondheims and the rest of the sing-song drama lot. In Spamalot, as in The Producers, everything is absolutely spot-on and studiously ingratiating. Idle's show isn't desperate to please, really; rather, it's confident that everything it does will provide pleasure...
...Spamalot it's often hard to tell whether the stypefyingly simple lyrics and false rhymes ("So be strong / Keep right on / To the end / Of your song / Do not fail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail") a joke on the banality of such songs? Or is it the real thing, a straightforwardly banal inspirational? Which is not to say that a song can't also be what it makes fun of - that a faux-inspirational song can't be inspirational and incorrigibly, addictively, sing-alongable. Remember that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" became...
...joke in Spamalot is that the whole thing has been reconfigured for a Vegas extravaganza - it'll feel right at home in Wynn Las Vegas, especially when King Arthur warns, "Remember, gentlemen: what happens in Camelot, stays in Camelot" - or, who'd have imagined it?, a cruise show. An audience member is brought on stage; confetti festoons the crowd; there's everything but a conga line out of the theater...