Spamalot

The touring company of Spamalot 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’m far more ambivalent.

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’t think I’ve seen an actual musical since I left Tuacahn in 2004. And I was a theatre major! How pathetic is that?

Still, I can’t get over the feeling that the show, in my considered opinion, just doesn’t work.

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’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail over three billion times, so I already knew most of his lines.

Which, of course, was another part of the problem.

Huge chunks of this show are transplanted directly from the original movie, and these actors just can’t hold a candle to Cleese, Palin, Jones, Idle, and even Gilliam. But the actor who you miss most of all is Graham Chapman – and not just because he’s dead.

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’s regal; he’s commanding; he’s 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’s 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’re bizarre and strange, but only because Arthur provides a touchstone for normalcy. In the stage adaptation, they’re just stupid – and not the good, funny kind of stupid. They’re truly painful to watch.)

Spamalot’s 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’s a Vegas lounge act. It has replaced stark with smarmy.

And smarmy just isn’t funny.

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’s in a real castle. On stage, when the same taunter is about five feet above the knights on a wall on wheels, it’s much harder to suspend disbelief, especially since it’s 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.

Spamalot 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 “The Song That Goes Like This,” which mocks obligatory Andrew Lloyd Webber-style power ballads, and “You Won’t Succeed On Broadway If You Don’t Have Any Jews,” 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 “I’m All Alone,” where Arthur laments his solitude while standing next to his increasingly frustrated servant, who resents being ignored.

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 – 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’t 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 – instead, it just brought the momentum of the show to a screeching halt. She would have made a great straight woman, though – a pity her part didn’t call for that.

I’m not really complaining. On the whole, I enjoyed myself. And my wife loved it. But next time I want to revisit Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table, I’ll watch the movie instead.