A 'Spamalot' Sidekick's Moment to Shine

Jeff Dumas Sees (and Sings) 'The Bright Side of Life'

Sure, he wants to sell tickets, but when Jeff Dumas says Washington audiences are awesome, he sounds like he means it. The actor won a Helen Hayes Award as a supporting performer for his 2006 appearance in "Monty Python's Spamalot" at the National Theatre -- a house he loves for being the antithesis of newer, enormous venues.

"It's such an intimate theater," he says. "The audience is pretty much right on top of you. The audiences were insane. For many a city after that, we'd all kind of get this wistful look in our eyes and go, 'Remember D.C.?' "

Dumas and the rest of the "Spamalot" touring cast return to the National Dec. 11 through Jan. 6. The musical is based on the British comedy troupe's 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Python alum Eric Idle wrote the book and collaborated on music and lyrics with John Du Prez. Mike Nichols directed.

Idle persuaded Nichols to include the tune "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which hails from the crucifixion scene in the Pythons' 1979 New Testament sendup, "Life of Brian." In his role as Patsy, King Arthur's dogsbody, Dumas (DOOM-ahs, with the "s" pronounced) gets to sing the number to buck Arthur up.

"I am King Arthur's squire-slash-horse," explains the slight, 36-year-old actor, who plays the horse by clapping coconut halves together -- a cheap laugh inspired by the original film's low budget. Dumas says Patsy "makes sure his boss doesn't fall off the edge of a cliff. He's there to pick him up a little bit when he's down."

Patsy is "one of those characters I think a lot of people can relate to -- that guy who maybe did a lot of work in the office that day and didn't get any credit," says Dumas, adding, "That's okay. I've made a career out of playing sidekicks."

These have included Nicely-Nicely Johnson in "Guys and Dolls" and Sancho Panza in "Man of La Mancha" in his home town of Chicago, where Dumas has been a busy actor for years. He was appearing in "Wicked" there when Chicago tryouts for the national company of "Spamalot" were held.

"When I first heard that they were doing a musical version of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't initially thinking, oh boy, this could go south really quick," Dumas says. He told the producers he didn't want to audition, but did hire on as a reader -- covering various roles so auditioning actors had someone to play off. The casting folks urged Dumas to try out for Patsy, he says, and he wound up in New York to get Nichols's stamp of approval.

Dumas praises the ensemble work and chemistry among his fellow cast members and quotes Idle as telling them early on, "There are no 'stars' on this tour. When we [the Pythons] first got together, we were just a bunch of guys from Oxford and Cambridge who thought we had some material that was funny. We weren't stars. The material was the star."

Tough Girls Go 'Boom'

The speech and gestures of the girl gangbangers in Kia Corthron's "Breath, Boom," having its Washington premiere at Studio Theatre 2ndStage Dec. 13-Jan. 6, seem torn from the casebook of many a social worker.

"Some of it just came from my imagination," Corthron says, "but I've also spent some time here and there teaching playwriting in prisons," including a week-long seminar for high school girls in juvenile detention on New York City's Rikers Island. It was, she says, "a very positive experience, almost like a TV movie."

Her play, which was commissioned by London's Royal Court Theatre and premiered there in 2000 and was done in New York in 2001, is no after-school special, however. The girls in "Breath, Boom" are tough. They commit drive-by shootings, beat disobedient "sisters," ignore a cellmate committing suicide. And the toughest among them is Prix. Sexually abused as a child by her mother's live-in boyfriend and hardened on the streets of the Bronx, Prix manifests tender feelings only in her love of colorful fireworks.