On a Broadway overrun with recycled cinematic IP — flying DeLoreans, questionable adventures in cross-dressing, big red windmills, revenge shopping sprees — the revival of Eric Idle and John Du Prez’s Spamalot is a big, fat, raspberry-blowing bait and switch. And that’s a good thing. When Spamalot (tagline: “A musical lovingly ripped off from … Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) first rode its invisible horse into Times Square in 2005, the Hollywood-to-Broadway pipeline was already pumping (the same year gave us Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Color Purple), but these days, the flow of nostalgia-driven “content” is cloying enough to make you downright queasy. It’s hard to sit in a theater where folks have paid many dollars to hear lines they remember Christopher Lloyd or Julia Roberts saying, sprinkled between mediocre songs. Given that reciting bits of Holy Grail is practically an NCAA sport, a stage adaptation would seem to be headed straight for the danger zone — the place where a play becomes, not to put too fine a point on it, a dead parrot.
But in its best moments, Spamalot knows its business, and that’s show business, baby. Its smart move was to translate Grail’s cheeky meta-ness into a new medium. The movie knew it was a movie, the musical knows it’s a musical, and it goes coconuts to the wall to send up and celebrate that fact. In the Broadway landscape of 2023, Spamalot turns out to be oddly well positioned to lure people in with the promise of the quotably familiar, then blast them in the face with a confetti cannon full of THEATER (and literal confetti).
Of course, you get all the recitable bits, too — they couldn’t very well not — and in director-choreographer Josh Rhodes’s splashy production, the pleasure of those bits waxes and wanes. At first, when a couple of sentries popped up to debate swallow airspeed velocity in the turrets of Paul Tate dePoo III’s set (a Technicolor mash-up of mostly flat scenery and hyperactive Terry Gilliam–esque projections that Tate also designed), my heart sank just a bit. Was this going to be Rocky Horror — the closest thing Americans have to pantomime — without the crucial fun of being able to yell along and throw toast? But then it started raining kick lines, ostrich feathers, tap and tinsel, and more references than you could shake a severed arm at. (Also, people did yell, and whistle, along.) By the time Sir Galahad (a very funny Nik Walker) and the Lady of the Lake (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, whose voice is a 16-ton weight made of Silly Putty, massive and infinitely malleable) sailed in together on a gondola — with the image of a hulking chandelier descending in the backdrop of always-popping projections — I was, giddily, onboard. I mean, what are you gonna do, miss the boat?
Storywise, as with Holy Grail, we don’t need much to get us started. As a bespectacled–and–bow-tied historian (Ethan Slater) explained to us, it’s England in A.D. something-something — plague, pestilence, Angles, Saxons, etc. Arthur, King of the Britons (James Monroe Iglehart), and his faithful servant, Patsy (Christopher Fitzgerald), are roaming the land in search of knights for Arthur’s Round Table (a Set Piece Not Appearing in This Play). They manage to collect the chronically craven Sir Robin (Michael Urie), the lexically challenged Sir Lancelot (Taran Killam), the dim and flatulent Sir Bedevere (Jimmy Smagula), and the hot socialist Sir Galahad. Arthur’s not picky about whom he promotes to his king’s guard, and the play has fun conflating the knights with other Python creations: Robin and Lancelot begin as the “Bring out yer dead”–shouting corpse gatherers, and Galahad, first name Dennis, was born and raised a mudslinging anarcho-syndicalist.
You know the rest — or if you don’t, that’s fine. It involves going to Camelot, questing for the Holy Grail, getting taunted by Frenchmen, finding shrubberies, and launching grenades at killer rabbits. More important, it involves a deluge of meta musical shenanigans that manage to be flagrantly winky without feeling exclusive. Kritzer makes adoring allies of the audience as she belts and yodels her way through parodies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Dreamgirls, Céline Dion, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli — even the Elphaba “battle cry.” (“Whatever happened to my part?” she sings in the disgruntled second-act rafter-shaker “Diva’s Lament,” speaking for forgotten female leads everywhere.) There are Vegas-y extravaganzas, tap throw-downs, and nods to Chicago, West Side Story, La Cage aux Folles, and Company: “And another hundred people just contracted the plague,” trills Slater, here as the delicate Prince Herbert, who just wants to siiiiiiiiing. This stuff is cleverly and hospitably crafted: Even if you don’t know the specific point of reference, you still get the joke.
Then, wildest of all, there’s “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway.” Eventually, as Spamalot becomes the musical-theater singularity, Arthur and his knights are tasked (by the side-quest-happy Knights Who Say “Ni!”) with putting on a Broadway musical. As the song-and-dance-obsessed Sir Robin, Urie takes center stage to explain to Arthur that, tragically, they “won’t succeed on Broadway” — because they “don’t have any Jews.” This probably felt waggishly irreverent in 2005, but in the fall of 2023, it’s a real spit-take moment. You can feel the communal intake of air in the room. I imagine Spamalot’s team had conversations about the world’s current parade of horrors and decided, in the spirit of Mel Brooks and Max Bialystock, to go ahead anyway. And as Urie — a superlative clown with elastic in his limbs and a warbling sine wave for a voice — joins the ensemble for a version of the Fiddler on the Roof bottle dance (with grails subbed for bottles, of course), it’s hard to be mad that they did. It’s joyful, it’s outrageous, and in a weird, shameless way, it forces us to reckon with our own severely heightened contemporary reactions. There’s plenty of harm in the world, and this isn’t part of it.
The real secret of Spamalot’s welcoming, throw-it-all-at-the-wall spirit is that the show is what you would get if you gave a community theater a couple of million dollars. The doubling of the central cast is a big part of this ethos. Yes, the production has an inexhaustible ensemble (whose costume racks filled with Jen Caprio’s bonanza of sequins, feathers, and chain mail must be a mile long), but there’s a certain scrappy energy in keeping Slater, Urie, Killam, Walker, and Smagula Whac-A-Mole-ing between parts, presumably leaving a trail of hats, wigs, and doublets backstage. They’re all doing breathless quadruple duty, and their glee is evident — on the stage and even in the Playbill. “Please scream louder for James than for Nik Walker,” reads Iglehart’s bio. Walker’s bio notes, “Sworn enemy of James Iglehart. Infinitely cooler than James Iglehart. Protect Nik from James Iglehart.” This is the kind of thing you get in the program for the local production of Shrek Jr. It’s stupid, it’s genuine, it’s unembarrassed, un-precious, and cheerfully un-“professional,” and I am here for it.
It’s true that there’s a sugar-high quality to Spamalot: By the end, your teeth are buzzing from the sheer multitude of sparkles and crescendos. But there’s also an embrace of its form’s inherent absurdity that feels almost existential, and thereby true to Python. Perhaps it’s the sugar talking, but as a pile of plague corpses joined Patsy to sing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (cribbed from Life of Brian because why not?), the logical conclusion of musical theater seemed clear to me: Here is this thing we’ve created, these pageants of absolute ridiculousness, because life is absolutely ridiculous but much darker and with less dancing — and because, in the words of the comedian Dylan Moran, “You should be alive as you can until you’re totally dead.”
Spamalot is at the St. James Theatre.
