Chorus Line to return to Broadway in 2006

Idle had been thinking about writing a musical comedy with Du Prez for years, ever since he'd starred as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in the English National Opera's 1986 production of "The Mikado." Two years later, he was in the Los Angeles office of Mel Brooks, pitching a stage adaptation of "The Producers." Brooks declined, wanting to concentrate on films, and being unsure, in any case, that such a thing would work.


"I was right about ?'The Producers,'" Idle said, now sitting in his chair. "I was there on opening night, and I knew it was going to be a gigantic hit. And at that point I had had the idea for the ?'Holy Grail' musical, but I dismissed it because of the Python business thing."

Long ago, the Pythons made an informal agreement that any one of them had veto power over possible Python projects. Over the years, this has protected them from a variety of ill-advised spinoffs or misuses of the Python name, but the requirement has hampered many other endeavors...

Given the fickle and hypercritical nature of the group, in conceiving "Spamalot" Idle had to manage his expectations. He prepared intensely on his own, before even telling the other Pythons he was working on the musical. Determined to assemble the most polished presentation possible, he sent the Pythons not only a draft of the script but half a dozen studio versions of the songs.


Idle got out of his chair. "You want to hear the song that did it?" He was already at his computer, looking for the tune. He then played a song called "The Song That Goes Like This." It was simultaneously a perfect booming Broadway ballad and a ruthless taking apart of the booming Broadway ballad.


Idle was not supposed to be revealing details of the show, but he seemed too excited to hold back...

After sending out the "Spamalot" songs and script, Idle waited for the Pythons' approval, expecting that it might take weeks or months. Palin was in the Himalayas for the BBC; Cleese was in Santa Barbara; and Jones, when he received the package, was in his garden in London with Gilliam. Somehow, Idle heard back from all of them in short order. Terry Jones organized a conference call to talk about it, and later sent an e-mail to Idle. "There was an unnerving degree of agreement," he wrote. "Terry G. and John were both (surprisingly) tempted to get more involved in the project because they thought it was so good, but were tempered by the feeling that it is really your project and that you wouldn't appreciate interference from superannuated, white-haired ex-Pythons."


Idle received notes of encouragement and constructive criticism of the script from the Pythons, but for the most part they have been operating on the assumption that this is Idle's project, for better or worse. "If it flops," Idle said, sitting down again in his chair, "they can just blame me. They can walk right away: ?'Well, Eric fucked it up.' If it succeeds, though, they'll be there opening night." Then he laughed for a long time.

MARCH MADNESS

by JOHN LAHR

Monty Python takes on Broadway.

Issue of 2005-03-28
Posted 2005-03-21





Silliness is an assertion of youthfulness, playful raspberry blown at everything tha weighs us down?-history, theology psychology, and, especially, mortality. I you're looking for a theme to the inspire antics of "Spamalot" (at the Shubert)?- musical that is, according to the marquee, "lovingly ripped off" from the movie "Mont Python and the Holy Grail"?-you'll find it on twenty-five-dollar T-shirt that's for sale in th lobby: i'm not dead yet . . .," it says. The catchphrase, which is intoned throughout the evening by plague-ridden corpses, by dragooned soldiers, and even by an amputee knight, is an impudent anthem of comedy: an act of defiance, not distraction. Caprice is hard, heroic work, and King Arthur (Tim Curry) speaks for zanies of every era when he sings, "For life is quite absurd, / And death's the final word. / You must always face the curtain with a bow!" In the absence of divine certainty, the director Mike Nichols and his deft assembly of Merry-Andrews have stage-managed their own act of grace, calling down from the heaven of their imaginations a taste of youth's eternal spring. "Spamalot" is a gambol, and no mistake.


The show is the brainchild of the former Python Eric Idle, who wrote the book and lyrics and shares musical credit with John Du Prez. The only other Python imported into the proceedings is John Cleese, who is present as the petulant and condescending voice of God?-a role he was born to play. "I'm God, you stupid tit!" Cleese bellows from above, when explaining the Holy Grail. "Jesus! Now this shall be your quest." The Pythons, with the exception of the American Terry Gilliam, were all Oxbridge lads, university wits whose cavorting was a revenge on the constrictions of British middle-class life. Although their surreal impulse can be linked to other British entertainments of the time, such as "The Goon Show," the Pythons were intellectually more sophisticated than their predecessors?-at once wildly slapstick and wildly referential, which was the essence of their humor. "Spamalot," like the film it's based on, knowingly spoofs the motifs of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature, among them the perigrinatio (the journey) and the courtly-love tradition. Courtly love made a myth of suffering without reward; "Spamalot" makes a myth of reward without suffering. Here, the only threat to life is the Killer Rabbit. (Be afraid. Be very afraid.)


The English in the audience will recognize?-in the show's relentless punning, its sing-along, its summoning onstage of a "peasant" from the audience?-the show's debt to British pantomime. The Americans will recognize?-in the nods to Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim, and the arid slickness of romantic Broadway duets?-their own musical tradition. But audience members would have to be from Mars not to recognize "Spamalot" as a smash hit. A response to the Broadway musical's overproduced and overfreighted attempts at significance, the show is literally a slap in the face with a wet fish. No sooner does the curtain rise on a map of divided England, 932 A.D., with a historian delivering, in pseudo newsreel hyperbole, a lesson on King Arthur and his gathering of the knights for a holy quest?-"This man was Arthur, King of the Britons. For this was England!"?-than we are in, well, Finland. Finnish folk dancers hop and bop each other with fish, singing, "Schlip schlap?- / Schlip and schlap away . . . / You simply can't go wrong / In traditional fish-schlapping song." At the end of this bit of goofiness, the chorus concludes, "Finland, Finland, Finland / That's the country for me!" "I said England!" the historian growls. The chorus apologizes and slinks away. So much for the "integrated musical" and the "narrative arc"; we are in the land of no-holds-barred.


Nowhere in "Spamalot" is traditional stage naturalism more brilliantly spoofed than when King Arthur and his faithful servant, the well-named Patsy (the excellent Michael McGrath), first ride into view. The sound of horses' hooves precedes them. They enter horseless but prancing, with Patsy, coconut shells in hand, making clip-clop sounds behind the King. (Replica shells are available for sale in the lobby, so that audience members can do their own high-step around town.) Curry's droll King Arthur has a plummy, stentorian voice, a royal paunch, and a stolid, somewhat bewildered sense of command. "I am Arthur, King of the Britons," he says to Dennis Galahad's mother (Steve Rosen), who replies, "I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective." When the Lady of the Lake brings in the Laker Girls to help the King recruit Dennis to the "very, very, very round table," the cheer turns hip-hop. Curry, with a trim goatee and deep-set spaniel eyes, strolls in front of the gaudy cheerleaders with a rapper's swagger. He knows that it's a hilarious sight, and it's all the more amusing because he doesn't push it. "Who de King!" he crows.


Broadway audiences are used to being tickled to death. "Spamalot" 's freewheeling, nonlinear style and wacky non sequiturs are exhilarating because they keep viewers on their toes. (Two Frenchmen inspect the Trojan Rabbit placed outside their castle. "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" one asks. "What?" replies the other.) Of course, there are ludicrous sights: a monk and an abbess doing an Apache dance, a cow thrown over a castle wall, and God's pink hand descending to the seat in the audience, which shall remain nameless?-A-101?-where the Grail is hidden. But "Spamalot" is at its most sublime when it's most infantile. Many of these scenes fall to the hilarious Hank Azaria, who appears in several roles, including that of Sir Lancelot, who "bats for the other team," as they sing in the big rumba-numba "His Name Is Lancelot." Tim Hatley's costumes provide an explosion of color and cuffs that swirls around Sir Lancelot as he is outed in song: "His name is Lancelot! / And in tight pants a lot / He likes to dance a lot." Azaria also plays the Taunter, who, from the parapets of his master's French castle, spews Rabelaisian invective at King Arthur and his crew: "I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal-food-trough wipers! . . . I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" Azaria also appears on stilts, with reindeer horns on his helmet, as the eye-rolling, high-pitched Knight of Ni, who sets King Arthur's men an impossible task, only to change his name and his challenge. "We are now the Knights Who Say Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-f'tang-f'tang-boing-boing-ole biscuit barrel," he tells the bewildered men and assigns them the new challenge of getting a show on Broadway. "We don't stand a chance there," the cowardly Robin (David Hyde Pierce) says. "Broadway is a very special place, filled with very special people, people who can sing and dance often at the same time. They are a different people, a multi-talented people, a people who need people who are in many ways the luckiest people in the world."


"Spamalot" 's unrelenting visual and verbal sendup of Broadway banality is a tonic addition to the borrowed high jinks of the Python script. Although the show includes a medley of Idle's hit, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," from "The Life of Brian," "You Won't Succeed on Broadway," gleefully sung by Pierce, is the only really first-rate musical number here. "You may bring on a piano / But they will not give a damn-o / If you don't have any Jews," he sings, as dancers reproduce the famous squatting-and-kicking stool dance from "Fiddler on the Roof," only here they slide toward us with chalices, not bottles, balanced on their heads. "There's a very small percentile / Who enjoy a dancing Gentile," Pierce adds. The audience howls. Python humor is skepticism in cap and bells, so it's only natural that Idle has no time for the romantic bombast of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, which he skewers neatly in "The Song That Goes Like This":


A sentimental song
That casts a magic spell
They all will hum along
We'll overact like hell . . .
I'll sing it in your face
While we both embrace
And then we change the key!
Now we're into E
That's awfully high for me
But everyone can see
We should have stayed in D.



There are a few moments when hilarity and history collide and we smile at the stage with cold teeth. In order to annihilate the Killer Rabbit, the knights have to drop the Big One?-the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?-on the furry, fanged thing. As Brother Maynard, Pierce reads with sidesplitting earnestness from the Book of Armaments: "And the Lord spake, saying: ?'First, shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three.' "


"It is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy," Oscar Wilde said. "The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world." No living American theatrical knows more about the making of joy than Mike Nichols. As the leader of this jesters' jamboree, he is all cunning and control. At the show's last beat, he lets confetti rain down like blessings upon us. Comic endeavor is not an easy one, and we should not receive it lightly. The vulgarity, the noise, the glorious, gossamer folderol are all a bold and fierce declaration of life. As the poet Jack Gilbert writes:


We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.