NEW YORK -- With "hit" practically tattooed on its dizzy derriere, Monty Python's "Spamalot" opened last night at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre in a musical production so eager to please that it would, if it could, order you a cocktail and serve you a home-cooked meal.
Python fans can take a guarantee of ecstasy to the bank. (Eric Idle, who wrote the book and many of the songs, certainly will be making regular trips there.) The show, a shameless knockoff of the troupe's 1975 movie spoof "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," can claim at least one theatrical innovation -- inciting entrance applause for bits of dialogue as well as actors.
Christopher Sieber as Galahad and Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake: The actors seem to ham a lot.
(Joan Marcus)
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For example, before Hank Azaria, playing an inscrutable denizen of the forest, can finish the typically nonsensical Pythonism "We are the knights who say 'Ni!' " the audience provides the sort of worshipful reaction that can be triggered only by repeated exposure. The reflex-response laughs come on virtually every lifted line, from the memorable "Bring out your dead!" to the demented "Ecky ecky ecky ecky f'tang f'tang boing boing ole biscuit barrel."
The production is not always worthy of the guffaws. This frenetic stroll down the Python memory lane, a byway littered with the British comics' inspired non sequiturs, makes for an erratically zany evening, one that is for the most part faithful to the troupe's cheeky ridicule of all things British. (To bolster the show's Broadway credentials, Idle tosses in a slew of New York-centric jokes about Jews, gays and Stephen Sondheim.) Among the better parody production numbers in this lampoon of the King Arthur legend is one about the emergence of Arthur's Lady of the Lake (Sara Ramirez), complete with her pompom-brandishing "Laker Girls." Another is the clever "Song That Goes Like This," which sends up all those generic sentimental songs in musicals that go exactly like, well, this.
Buoyed by the Monty Python brand and a trio of well-known stars, Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce and Azaria, "Spamalot" probably does not have to worry much about the reservations expressed by drama critics. Still, a few have to be registered. A considerable problem is tone. As directed by Mike Nichols, the production is sometimes pitched too frantically, a state of affairs that contributes to an unhealthy amount of scenery-chewing. Ramirez's performance, for example, begins just boisterously enough, but by the second act she has been turned into a nostril-flaring ham.
Because the show quotes from the film stenographically, the question of staleness also arises. Some of the jokes not only are 30 years old, they feel 30 years old. More so than "The Producers," Idle and Nichols's obvious model, "Spamalot" is nostalgic about its movie gags, and some of the shtick replayed here simply does not land as well as in the film version. (Whereas virtually everything in "The Producers" works better onstage.)
The attempt, for instance, to re-create a funny bit of business involving a dueling knight who has his limbs chopped off but continues fighting is staged as if it were rigged by a high school drama club. The scenes, too, of the recruiting of the knights of the Round Table are surprisingly inert. More painfully, there is the issue of delivery. When those trademark lines are spoken in lame British accents -- Hyde Pierce's is especially unconvincing -- the sense of being transported to Pythonland is altogether weakened.
The locutions of Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman and John Cleese (the last cast here as the voice of God) should not have to be meticulously reproduced. But part of the fun of Monty Python was its subversion of English manners and the way the English speak. Some of that is lost here.
Curry, who actually is a limey, seems to understand this at a gut level, and he's one of the best things in "Spamalot." He plays Arthur (portrayed in the film by the late, great Chapman) as a Prince Charles for the Middle Ages, a clueless, if forgivably foppish, upper-class twit. Azaria, a splendid mimic -- he's a whole chorus of voices on "The Simpsons" -- is assigned in "Spamalot" to the role of Lancelot, as well as to a slew of foreign-accented parts, and he performs all his tasks with elan. Hyde Pierce, late of "Frasier" and usually a terrific farceur, has a breakout number in the second act as a knight in love with show tunes. But he lacks the protean touch required for the variety of smaller roles he's apportioned.
Idle and Nichols take full advantage of a current fad in musical comedy, one that suggests that every joke is an inside joke, that doing a Broadway musical is so uncool it's cool. (As Roger De Bris sings in "The Producers," "The thing you gotta know is / Everything is show biz.") Just as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" spoofs movie conventions, the musical is crammed with winking references to theater. "West Side Story" and "Fiddler on the Roof" are freshly annihilated, but the audience-participation gag at the end of the show is a cheap steal from Dame Edna's playbook.
The splashy sets and costumes by Tim Hatley wittily merge disparate eras. It's as if a Celtic illuminated manuscript were on display in the casino of the MGM Grand. Idle's score -- some of the music is by John Du Prez -- is a crudely enjoyable mixed bag. Some numbers are taken from the movie, another from Python's "Life of Brian." A slew of others have been written for "Spamalot," and none receives a more thunderous reception than Hyde Pierce's second-act showstopper, "You Won't Succeed on Broadway."
One of the sequences that transfer most successfully from the movie concerns a wispy prince, superbly embodied by Christian Borle, who against the wishes of his loutish father (the excellent Christopher Sieber) attempts to break into song. His parody of Sondheim's "Another Hundred People" -- "And another hundred people just contracted the plague . . . " -- represents "Spamalot" at its nutty apex. The show doesn't consistently scale those priceless heights, but over the roar of the crowd, who's paying attention?
Spamalot, book and lyrics by Eric Idle, music by Idle and John Du Prez. Directed by Mike Nichols. Sets and costumes, Tim Hatley; lighting, Hugh Vanstone; choreography, Casey Nicholaw; special effects, Gregory Meeh; sound, Acme Sound Partners; music director, Todd Ellison; orchestrations, Larry Hochman. With Steve Rosen, Kevin Covert, Michael McGrath, Thomas Cannizzaro, Greg Reuter. Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes. At the Sam S. Shubert Theatre, 225 W. 44th St., New York. Call 212-239-6200 or visit www.telecharge.com.
