When producer-turned-director Richard Carroll created a new spin on Calamity Jane at the small but influential Hayes Theatre with onstage seating, irreverent performances, and meta-theatrical slapstick, it was a massive success. The show toured to five cities in New South Wales and Victoria, and returned to Sydney as part of Belvoir’s mainstage 2018 season – a rare feat.
Now Carroll and his company, One Eyed Man Productions, are back at the Hayes. They have attempted to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with Spamalot, the Eric Idle-penned musical based on cult hit Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It’s an admirable undertaking: the Hayes feels transformed with onstage traverse seating banks, and the production – which is heavy with audience interaction, but not in an intimidating way – is unavoidably immersive and appropriately unpretentious. You’re there to have fun, and the environment is relaxed; it’s easy to feel ready for a laugh.
The assembled cast is trimmed-down from Broadway numbers to fit the small Hayes space, and it’s a broadly talented ensemble, almost all playing multiple parts alongside their more recognisable roles: Marty Alix (Sir Robin), Blake Appelqvist (Sir Galahad), Cramer Cain (King Arthur), Rob Johnson (Prince Herbert), Josie Lane (Lady of the Lake), Aaron Tsindos (Sir Lancelot), Bishanyia Vincent (Patsy), and Jane Watt (Sir Bedevere). Their energy is unflagging, their gung-ho playing style undeniably charming. Lane is the big-voiced star of this show, delivering the kind of high drama with her powerhouse voice; an audience member on opening night muttered an audible “wow” as she took a breath between dazzling vocal acrobatics.
But the cast only has so much to work with. Created as a commercial property that profits from joke recognition, Spamalot feels like merchandise. Monty Python’s early ethos prior to their dissolution, money trouble, and Cleese’s own settlement-paying Fawlty Towers Live, directly opposed this kind of establishment joke factory. Plus the book, which frequently breaks the fourth wall to tear apart musical theatre as a genre while living solely inside it, bends towards the lazy and cynical.
Carroll, like many early-career directors, has a recognisable and reliable bag of directorial tricks, but he pulls from it far too often in Spamalot, which is weighed down by a subsequent paint-by-numbers dullness: he commits to bold, perhaps ill-advised ideas, which take the forefront here and only sometimes pay dividends, and he’s sprinkled the staging with his favoured Golden Age poses in poignant (or mock-poignant) moments – his hyper-referential modernity is always laced with, and sometimes held back by, nostalgia. He also has his cast get the audience to their feet in the final scene so you have an instant standing ovation – a winning move in Calamity Jane that seems much more calculated here.
It’s easy to compare Carroll’s two comedies, but in doing so Calamity Jane emerges as a much more successful study in irreverence, especially as it combined Carroll’s big-picture boldness with a cast of sharply instinctual actors, thoughtfully exploring the show’s queer subtext and lovingly lampooning its twists. (This Spamalot’s best, most inventive number – a localised update to ‘Star Song’ written for touring and international productions to replace ‘You Won’t Succeed on Broadway’ – was co-written by Carroll and Calamity co-stars Johnson and Virginia Gay).
Treating these two comedies so similarly just doesn’t work: you can’t lovingly lampoon a lampooning text in the same way you can a sincere, old-fashioned text. Spamalot is more text than subtext, and its own queer storylines are painfully dated (a shout-out to the postal survey doesn’t help bring it forward), and baking silliness on top of silliness just creates noise.
But even joyous performances can’t save this production from feeling uncomfortably synthetic, and a large reason for that is its sound design. Musically supervised by Conrad Hamill, the musical backing is recorded and poorly balanced, washing out the actors’ vocal mix. Many jokes are hamstrung by the inability to hear either setup or punchline.
Despite its noisy, shallow sheen, Spamalot is aggressively funny and doesn’t quit trying to make you laugh, so it still at times succeeds: Alix, a hundred-watt rising star with charisma for days, helms that ‘Star Song’ number, backed by a Millsy mask and capped with a Shannon Noll comic denouement that’s raucous and insider-y in equal measure; Cain’s delightfully expressive face carries King Arthur’s jokes over the line; Lane is irresistible; and the ensemble looks like they’re enjoying themselves so much that it’s easy to be onside. This one is best suited for the die-hard fans, both of the Monty Python and Hayes persuasion: when you’re excited for this specific show, it’s easier to tolerate its flaws.