Spamalot
Broadway review by Adam Feldman In the extremely funny 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the British comedy troupe’s lampoon of Arthurian legend, there is only one fully fledged musical number: a cutaway to the roundly ludicrous knights of Camelot, who dance in armored kicklines and describe themselves in such ridiculous rhymes as “We sing from the diaphragm a lot” and “We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot.” The very thought of it prompts the questing King Arthur to question his plans. “On second thought, let's not go to Camelot,” he decides. “It is a silly place.” Cut to the 2005 musical Spamalot, which expands the spirit of that 65-second sequence into a two-act Broadway show. It is a silly piece. Adapted by Eric Idle from the Holy Grail screenplay—with help from composer John Du Prez, and a handful of loaners from other Python sources (notably the Life of Brian song “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”)—this tongue-in-cheeky pageant still tells the episodic story of King Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) and his entourage in search of a vaunted relic. But jokes about medieval legend now take a back seat to metatheatrical tomfoolery about musical theater as a genre. Winking at Broadway conventions in a succession of zanily oversold numbers, it is essentially an ongoing parody of itself—so much so that when Gerard Allesandrini spoofed Spamalot for his Forbidden Broadway series, he simply had his actors perform an actual song from the show, “The Song That Goes Like Th