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    ‘Spamalot’ Review: You’ll Laugh in Its General Direction

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    In the first Broadway revival of the Monty Python musical, the old bits are verbatim but the clowns are running the circus.Even the coconuts get entrance applause.If you’ve seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie spoof of all things Arthurian and many things not, you know the coconuts I mean. And if you’re enough of a Python fan to have also seen “Spamalot,” the 2005 Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, you’ve probably memorized the whole bit. That’s the one in which Arthur’s trusted patsy, Patsy, slaps coconut halves together so the deluded king can pretend he has a horse. Call it a filly à deux.But the coconuts, whether or not they came to medieval England strung between two migratory African swallows, have stiff competition for beloved silliness in the blissful Broadway revival of “Spamalot” that opened on Thursday at the St. James Theater. They are by no means the only old favorites greeted with entrance applause. Among many others, so are a troupe of self-flagellating monks, a cart of corpses, a vulgar French taunter and a Trojan rabbit.This is the problem, and I suppose the glory, of a property (or should I say a shrubbery) like “Spamalot,” by Eric Idle of the original troupe and the composer John Du Prez. Drilled deep into the culture through thousands of collegiate viewings, many of those viewings enhanced by once-illegal substances, the loosely assembled collection of skits has become holy writ, not to be messed with. If a production dared to change anything, it would surely face an audience of originalists screaming “ni!” — though to be fair, it faces them anyway, as “Spamalot” has become a kind of Python karaoke.So what’s a revival to do?This one, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, gives the “ni”-sayers what they want. As far as I can tell, the best original bits are all preserved verbatim.Also preserved, obviously, is what passes for the plot, in which Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) mucks about England with Patsy (Christopher Fitzgerald) in search of knights to sit at the “very round” table. Yet before the assembled half-wits can fully enjoy the Las Vegas floor show that is Camelot, God (Steve Martin in an uncredited voice-over) commands them to stop their tap dancing and shove off in search of the holy grail. Not everyone is impressed. “If God is all-knowing,” says the not-so-brave Sir Robin, who may be looking to avoid personal bloodshed, “surely He must know where it is.”Though uttering the same lines as Idle did in the movie, and as David Hyde Pierce did in the 2005 production, Michael Urie as Robin puts a differently delightful comic spin on them. Throughout, Rhodes has encouraged the cast to personalize the material and, in many cases, enhance it. Taran Killam, expert as Lancelot and several of the quirkiest supporting characters, gives the French taunter not only the requisite outrageous accent but also a raspberry aria worthy of Mozart. In turn, when he sneers “I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur-king, you and all your silly English knnnniggets,” Arthur and Sir Galahad (Nik Walker) do a brilliant triple take — they are Black.In some hilarious head space between Liza Minnelli and Celine Dion, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, as the Lady of the Lake, essentially steals the show as she scats, belts and mutters private thoughts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLetting the clowns run the flying circus, at least part-time, is integral to the history of Python’s success. (Idle told The Times that the material survives because “it was written by its actors and acted by its writers.”) It is also a smart move for a show that could otherwise feel calcified; a production I saw at the Stratford Festival over the summer seemed more like an animatronic museum exhibit, making me doubt it was really revivable.And even this mostly excellent production betrays a faint odor of mothballs, especially in the projection-heavy scenic design of Paul Tate dePoo III, so dependent on the feel of Terry Gilliam’s original animations. The key to the comedy is not after all replication but individuation. The Pythons were each their own kind of oddball, and the bits are only funny with fresh bite.Another humor helper is authenticity. When Lancelot (who likes to dance a lot) comes to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and that damsel turns out to be a dopey prince named Herbert (Ethan Slater), the comics calibrate the exact middle point between snark and sincerity. (“Just think, Herbert,” says Lance as they kiss, “in a thousand years’ time this will still be controversial.”) The drag bits are likewise laughable yet honorable, as when Galahad’s blowzy mother, Mrs. Galahad (Jimmy Smagula), the recent widow of Nobby the Cretin, stands up proudly to Arthur: “I didn’t vote for you.” Equal-opportunity offensiveness — to gays, Jews, French, Finns and every kind of Briton — makes the show inoffensive to all.Unless, that is, you are very sensitive about your addled divas in sparkly gowns. Among a cast of performers unafraid to chew scenery, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, as the Lady of the Lake, that “watery tart” who “lobbed a scimitar” at Arthur, is the top masticator. In some hilarious head space between Liza Minnelli and Celine Dion, scatting, belting and muttering private thoughts — including, on the night I saw it, ad-libs about Patti LuPone and Ozempic — she essentially steals the show despite her frequent absences from it. The first line of her big second-act number is “Whatever happened to my part?”The revival leans into such meta-moments, which lean away from the movie and into a wonderland of Broadway self-reference. (Another snake-eating-its-tail song is “The Song That Goes Like This.”) Rhodes knows how to build these beautifully; they take off like roman candles. (Shield your eyes from the brightness of Cory Pattak’s lights and the dazzle of Jen Caprio’s costumes.) And if too many of the big numbers hit the same notes of too-muchness, Rhodes also lands the quiet ones gently, including “I’m All Alone,” in which Arthur laments his solitude while poor Patsy, fulfilling his name, stands next to him singing backup.For all its nostalgia value, and its endless verbal invention, “Spamalot,” like “Holy Grail,” and like the television series that spawned them both, has a very vexed soul. Taunters are angry, the taunted suffer, royals trace their authority to “some moistened bint” and God sends horseless knights to locate misplaced cups. It’s not a nice world out there in the Middle Ages — or ours. Luckily, vexations are evergreen if given half a chance, and, at least on Broadway, are assuageable. Just remember to always look on the bright side of life. And that supposedly harmless bunnies aren’t.SpamalotAt the St. James Theater, Manhattan; spamalotthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      It Is Not Dead Yet! ‘Spamalot’ Returns to Broadway. (Cue the Coconuts.)

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      The Monty Python-inspired show wants to give audiences a reason “to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible.”The terrifying knights still say “Ni!” The dead? Well, they are not quite dead yet. And King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (not dawn, not dusk, not late afternoon, but knights) still trot around to the sounds of coconuts banging together.All that is to say: “Spamalot” is back on Broadway, and it is still quite silly.The silliness was on display last month during a rehearsal at the Gibney Studios in Manhattan. David Josefsberg, one of the show’s standby actors, was having difficulty staying in character as the incompetent warlock Tim the Enchanter. The scene required him to adopt an outrageous accent to warn the knights about a scary beast, which ends up being a rabbit. (And the rabbit ends up being quite homicidal!) But he couldn’t keep it together as members of the cast and crew giggled while watching from the sides of the room. The giggles were contagious, filling the room throughout the rehearsal, including when the knights had to vary the banging of the coconuts between “trot” and “not trot.”The actors have been breaking character “all the time,” Josh Rhodes, the show’s director and choreographer, said after the rehearsal.“It’s lonely trying to land jokes. It’s a lousy thing to do to repeat it over and over again to a dead room,” Rhodes said. “Right now we’re still crafting it. So you want the energy in the room to still be a little silly.”Rhodes has a personal connection to the show: His husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original Broadway production, which opened in 2005. They married during the run. As King Arthur, James Monroe Iglehart is among a who’s who of Broadway notables in the cast: “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway — Mufasa and me.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor the uninitiated, “Spamalot” is a Monty Python-inspired spoof adapted from that comedy troupe’s 1975 cult film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” A sendup of King Arthur’s mythical quest for the Holy Grail, the movie was written by and starred the group’s members — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. It was Idle who had the idea to adapt it as a Broadway musical. (“Spam” is a reference to a Python sketch.)Idle wrote the original book and lyrics, and wrote the music with John Du Prez. Mike Nichols directed, and Casey Nicholaw choreographed. It was a smash, winning the Tony Award for best musical and running for nearly four years. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the show “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”At the time of that initial Broadway run, it had been decades since any truly new Python material — the 1983 film “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” — and the musical, which has since had productions in the West End and international tours, exposed a new generation to the quintessential British brand of humor. The revival, which opens Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater, is in a similar position. The last meaningful Python collaboration was in 2014, when the group united for a series of shows at the O2 Arena in London. (Two members of the group have died: Chapman in 1989 and Jones in 2020.)Idle said he had “no idea” how Python’s brand of humor had continued to hold up today.“Python is portmanteau comedy,” Idle, 80, wrote in an email via a spokeswoman. “It has a bit of everything. People always found it funny but they didn’t always agree on which bits. I think it survives because it was written by its actors and acted by its writers. It is executive-free comedy.”This revival was the brainchild of the producer Jeffrey Finn, an executive at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Rhodes’s production of “Spamalot” had a critically well-received run there this past spring, and garnered enough of an audience response that Finn thought a Broadway production could overcome the ticket sale malaise that pervades the industry.“What I feel like we proved at the Kennedy Center is that the escapism and the joy in the theater that this show delivers is what I feel audiences are looking for now,” Finn said. “Because it’s a crazy, harsh world out there, and having two and a half hours just to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible, is just joyful.”“Spamalot” was adapted from the 1975 movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which satirizes the Arthurian legend. Columbia PicturesThe revival doesn’t update the book or music substantially, if at all, but the show does offer new staging, choreography and improv from a who’s who of Broadway notables, including James Monroe Iglehart (King Arthur), Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (the Lady of the Lake), Ethan Slater (Prince Herbert) and Taran Killam (Lancelot).“Have you ever seen a person of color play the king? No,” said Iglehart, who originated the role of the Genie in the Broadway adaptation of “Aladdin.” (This is his first leading role on Broadway.) “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway: Mufasa and me.”At the rehearsal, the run-through was chock-full of inside jokes about Broadway and references to current events. But ultimately the troupe’s material — exhibited in several films, a television show, tours and albums — is still the backbone of the show.Killam, the “Saturday Night Live” alum, called himself a “dyed-in-the-wool” Python fan and said that the “intelligent absurdist humor of Python is in my veins.” (Killam will be replaced by Alex Brightman in January. Brightman was in the Kennedy Center production, but the opening of the Broadway run conflicted with his current Broadway production, the play “The Shark Is Broken.”)“They were a true variety sketch group,” Killam said. “There were six different voices with different points of view and different objectives. So that brought such good balance. I think the sort of life spirit of their comedy is absurdity and certainly aiming that absurdity at social and economical structures of power, be it the monarchy or the church or banks or a class system. There is an intelligence about their absurdity.”The Python inclination to poke fun at institutions is present throughout “Spamalot,” as when God commands Arthur and his knights to find the Holy Grail. In response, a knight wonders why God himself — if he is all-knowing — doesn’t know where it is.The show’s director Josh Rhodes, center, flanked by the producer Jeffrey Finn, and the associate director Deidre Goodwin during rehearsals last month.Gregg Delman for The New York TimesThe biggest difference between “Holy Grail” and “Spamalot” is the Lady of the Lake character, who does not exist in the movie. The role has become a launching pad of sorts. Sara Ramirez won a best featured actress Tony for originating the role on Broadway. Hannah Waddingham, a star of the hit Apple show “Ted Lasso,” performed the part in the West End and was nominated for an Olivier.Kritzer, a theater veteran who last appeared on Broadway in “Beetlejuice,” wasn’t as familiar as Killam with the work of Monty Python, but she did see the original production with Ramirez.“I never thought of myself doing this role, simply for the fact that very tall women have played this part — and I am 5-foot-3,” Kritzer said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, it’s perfect for you.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ I always think of it as this tall person role. And then when I got into rehearsal, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like my modern Carol Burnett showcase.’”In this version, Kritzer said, “they let us improvise a lot. I’m doing things that were never in the original, ever, ever. Musically and otherwise.”When Monty Python burst onto the scene in the 1960s, its brand of comedy was considered revolutionary. They broke the rules of traditional comedy at the time with unusually structured sketches that would routinely break the fourth wall, end abruptly and not rely on simple punchlines, not to mention Gilliam’s zany animations.Now, “Spamalot,” at least in 2023, is a safe comedy with an enduring fan base who devour all things Python. This was apparent at an early preview, when Killam emerged as one of the Knights of Ni. The crowd started chanting “Ni!” before Killam said a word, prompting Killam to gesture to the crowd as if to say, “You get it.”“Even in any of the comedies that I’ve done on Broadway, there’s always some like, ‘We’re going to learn something,’” Kritzer said. “We don’t really learn something in this. We just have a great time, and that’s OK.”As to whether this will be the last-ever newish Monty Python project, Idle responded, “We can only pray.” More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More

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      Denis O’Brien, Force in Ex-Beatle’s Film Company, Dies at 80

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      He and George Harrison created Handmade Films to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Other successes followed, but the partnership ended badly.Denis O’Brien, who with George Harrison, the former Beatle, founded a production company that made several audacious hit movies, beginning with “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in 1979, before the partnership and the company’s fortunes soured, died on Friday in Swindon, west of London. He was 80.His daughter Kristen O’Brien said the death, in a hospital, was caused by intra-abdominal sepsis.Mr. O’Brien became Mr. Harrison’s business manager in 1973, hired to bring some stability to Mr. Harrison’s financial affairs, which had been muddled since the Beatles broke up four years earlier. And when Mr. Harrison’s friend Eric Idle, of the Monty Python comedy troupe, went to Mr. Harrison with a problem in 1979, it was Mr. O’Brien who nudged Mr. Harrison into producing movies.Monty Python had begun work on a follow-up to its 1975 hit, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The new movie was a satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah. Mr. Idle’s problem was that EMI, the entertainment conglomerate that had been financing the new movie, had gotten cold feet and pulled out just as production was gearing up. He asked if Mr. Harrison could help financially, and Mr. Harrison in turn consulted Mr. O’Brien.“Denis called me back a few days later and said, ‘OK, I think I know how to do it: We’ll be the producers,’” Mr. Harrison told The Advertiser of Australia in 1986. “He was laughing because he knew that my favorite movie was ‘The Producers’” — the Mel Brooks comedy — “which I’d watched over and over.”Mr. Harrison, putting up as collateral his estate in Henley-on-Thames, England, provided some $4 million to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” It was the first release of Handmade Films, the production company that he and Mr. O’Brien created. As Mr. Idle told the story, Mr. Harrison had a simple reason for financing the film: He wanted to see the movie.“At $4 million, this is still the most anyone has ever paid for a movie ticket,” Mr. Idle wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times in 2004.In his telling, Mr. O’Brien had actually structured the project assuming that the film would lose money and that it could be a tax write-off; instead, it became a hit and a beloved entry in the annals of comedy films. Time Out recently ranked it No. 3 on its list of the 100 greatest comedy movies of all time, trailing only “Airplane!” and “This Is Spinal Tap.”With “Brian,” Handmade Films was off on a run of quirky critical and often financial successes, including “The Long Good Friday” (1980), a crime drama with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren; “Time Bandits” (1981), directed by Terry Gilliam of the Python troupe and featuring other Pythons; the noir drama “Mona Lisa” (1986), another vehicle for Mr. Hoskins; and the comedy “Withnail & I,” which became a sort of cult classic and was ranked No. 7 on that Time Out list.Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison were executive producers on these and numerous other Handmade films, and their early successes were credited with helping to revive the moribund British film industry. They shared a taste for offbeat scripts.“We tend to do movies that come to us because no one else wants to make them,” Mr. Harrison told Newsweek in 1987.That was certainly the case with “Time Bandits,” a hard-to-categorize movie about time-traveling dwarves that they had trouble getting distributed, securing a deal with the independent Avco Embassy Pictures only after the major studio distributors had declined.“There were any number of majors who walked out of the screenings,” Mr. O’Brien told The Los Angeles Times in November 1981, just after the film had enjoyed a robust opening weekend.But Handmade’s Midas touch didn’t last. Some of its movies were costly bombs, most famously “Shanghai Surprise” (1986), a widely panned adventure yarn that starred Madonna and Sean Penn.By the 1990s the company was in financial trouble, and Mr. Harrison soon turned on his longtime partner, accusing him in a 1995 lawsuit of mishandling his money. A court later awarded Mr. Harrison more than $11 million. When Mr. O’Brien sought to declare bankruptcy, Mr. Harrison tried to block that declaration.In 2001, when Mr. Harrison, by then ill with cancer, did not show up to give a deposition in that court challenge, a bankruptcy judge dismissed the case. Mr. Harrison died later that year at 58.In the years since, Mr. O’Brien took most of the criticism for the collapse of Handmade, which was sold in 1994 to a Canadian concern. In a rare interview, with The Belleville News-Democrat of Illinois in 1996, Mr. O’Brien, who lived in the St. Louis area at the time, gave his own interpretation.“As long as we were successful, we had a wonderful relationship,” he said of Mr. Harrison.“The money is not the important aspect here,” he added. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were a dollar or a million dollars. It’s George not knowing how to accept failure or take responsibility for it.”Ms. O’Brien, his daughter, used to visit Mr. Harrison’s estate with her father as a child, playing in the elaborate gardens that were Mr. Harrison’s pride and joy. The falling-out, she said by email, was painful for her father.“I know he felt just as hurt and betrayed as I am sure Harrison felt,” she said.Eric Idle, center, in a scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). A satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah, it was the first movie produced by Handmade Films.Python (Monty) PicturesDenis James O’Brien was born on Sept. 12, 1941, in St. Louis. His father, Albert, worked for Ralston Purina, where he rose to president; his mother, Ruth (Foster) O’Brien, was office manager for an interior-decorator shop as well as a homemaker.Mr. O’Brien played basketball at Webster Groves High School, near St. Louis, before earning a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a law degree at Washington University in St. Louis.He worked with the Paris law firm Coudert Frères from 1967 to 1969, then held finance positions at N.M. Rothschild & Sons and the EuroAtlantic Group, working out of London.In 1971 he began advising the comic actor Peter Sellers, who recommended Mr. O’Brien to Mr. Harrison, a friend.Mr. Harrison was known to enjoy Pythonesque humor, but Mr. O’Brien also had a sense of impishness. Michael Palin, one of the Pythons, recalled by email that Mr. O’Brien used to call him up and pretend to be Mr. Sellers. Funny accents were a favorite gag — Kristen O’Brien said that when she or her sister, Laura, would call their father, they would sometimes find themselves speaking to “Fritz the German.”On “Life of Brian,” Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison let the Pythons do the filmmaking, but Mr. O’Brien later became more involved in the creative side of movies he was financing. His detractors said this had contributed to the company’s downfall; however, the screenwriter Stephen Rivele (“Ali,” “Nixon”), who with his writing partner, Chris Wilkinson, wrote seven scripts for Handmade in its later years (though none were produced), said his experience with Mr. O’Brien had been positive.“On every draft, he gave careful, handwritten notes, which were always as perceptive as they were polite,” Mr. Rivele said by email. “He had very keen insights and original ideas which invariably made the scripts better.”Mr. O’Brien moved back to England in 2008 after living near St. Louis for a time. At his death he lived in Little Somerford. He was married four times, most recently to Phyllida Riddell O’Brien, who died in 2019. In addition to his daughters — who are from his first marriage, to Karen Lazarus — he is survived by a brother, Douglas.Ms. O’Brien said that in the last year her father had been showing signs of dementia, which seemed to alter his memory of his relationship with Mr. Harrison.“He seemed to have forgotten there was ever a falling-out,” she said, “and in this last year he loved to hear George’s music, and it would transport him back to some really good times in his life. He had nothing but good memories left.” More