'Spamalot' at new West Chester theater: Solid, overlong crowd-pleaser
We are deep into the age of the meta-musical – the musical that pillages and satirizes other musicals. Monty Python's Spamalot, winner of the 2005 Tony Award for Best Musical, is just one example of a genre that has spawned The Producers, Urinetown, Something Rotten!, Forbidden Broadway, and, most recently, Spamilton (which, judging from YouTube clips, is hilarious).
Spamalot is loosely based on the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a send-up of the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. (Python member Eric Idle wrote the book and lyrics, and collaborated with John Du Prez on the music.) Some bits, including a killer rabbit and a rude Frenchman whose frat-boy taunts stymie the knights, are recycled from the film. The show's most annoyingly hummable song, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," is lifted from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a 1979 film.
But Spamalot is also crammed with songs and dances spoofing the Broadway canon, from The Phantom of the Opera to Fiddler on the Roof and Company ("And another 100 people just contracted the plague. ..."). Its relentless battery of humor, both high and low (fart, defecation, and middle-finger jokes), adds up to solid, if overlong, middlebrow entertainment.
The audience at the new Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center in West Chester was clearly delighted by the Resident Theatre Company's exuberant inaugural production. R.T.C.'s founding artistic director, Kristin McLaughlin Mitchell, directs a versatile ensemble with panache, getting the timing and accents right, even if the whole enterprise seems much ado about not very much.
The plot involves the frequently digressive quest for the Holy Grail, which, like Dorothy's red slippers, turns out to be laden with symbolic meaning. (At the mention of the word symbol, a cymbal sounds — typical of the show's penchant for puns.)
Spamalot offers screwball takes on some familiar characters, including King Arthur (a strong-voiced Mark Woodard), who is essentially the production's straight man, and Sir Lancelot (Luke Bradt), who decidedly is not. There's also a diva-like, spotlight-demanding Lady of the Lake (Hannah Gaffney) who complains that she hasn't been featured in the second act, and a Sir Galahad (Kevin Toniazzo-Naughton), ridiculously insistent on his first name of Dennis.
Wallowing in anachronism, Spamalot (with choreography by Derek Roland) serves up Las Vegas-style chorus numbers, cheerleaders, a cancan, Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins parodies, and plenty of severed limbs, all against the backdrop of Lance Kniskern's castle set. Costume designer Kayla Speedy's woodsy, absurdist Knights Who Say Ni are particularly memorable.
But the show's zenith is the second-act extravaganza, "You Won't Succeed on Broadway," which insists that a Broadway triumph is impossible without Jews. As Sir Robin – Lukas Poost, channeling Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady – puts it: "There's a very small percentile,/That enjoys a dancing gentile." It's almost enough to make one forgive the fart jokes.
Monty Python's Spamalot. Through April 16. Resident Theatre Company at Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center, 226 N. High St., West Chester. Tickets: $25-$51. Information: www.rtcwc.org or 610-356-2787.
