Maybe This Time You Succeeded

Big-budget community theater should be this stupidly self-aware.

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IN A BROADWAY OVERRUN with recycled cinematic IP—flying DeLoreans, 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—that 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 Julia Roberts or Christopher Lloyd 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 goes coconuts to the wall to send up and celebrate that fact. In the present Broadway landscape, 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 also literal confetti).