Blood-thirsty bunnies, farting Frenchmen, knights who say “Ni!,” and the clickety-clack of coconuts: It can mean only one thing. Bring out your dead—and your not-yet-dead—Monty Python fans! Spamalot—the 2005 Tony-winning Best Musical “lovingly ripped off” (as the tagline sayeth) from the 1975 low-budget British movie—is back on Broadway, and it’s as wonderfully silly as ever.
After slaying in a short run last May at the Kennedy Center, the revival—directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, whose most recent NYC work includes the Encores! productions of Dear World and Mack & Mabel—rode its (invisible) horse up I-95 from Washington, D.C., with most of its company in tow: Tony winner James Monroe Iglehart (Aladdin) as King Arthur, Michael Urie (Grand Horizons, Torch Song) as the scaredy-cat Sir Robin, Nik Walker as the dashing Sir Dennis Galahad, and Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as the all-powerful Lady of the Lake. The multitalented—and apparently rubber-limbed—Ethan Slater (Broadway’s erstwhile SpongeBob SquarePants) joins the cast as, among others, the tweedy Historian, the unkillable Not Dead Fred, and an extremely annoying mime (is there any other kind?); SNL alum Taran Killam plays Sir Lancelot, the “knight who really loves the nightlife,” as well as, most notably, the French Taunter (“You are English bed-wedding types!” he sneers at Arthur & Co.) through Jan. 7, 2024, after which Alex Brightman assumes the role; and Christopher Fitzgerald (Young Frankenstein, Waitress) is Arthur’s steadfast sidekick Patsy, the part created so memorably by the late Michael McGrath.
In general, this is the Spamalot you remember—right down to the logo; it’s just a little…slimmed down. (Paul Tate dePoo III’s projections are doing a lot of heavy lifting.) Appropriately, there’s even an Ozempic joke. Among the other small tweaks: One of Eric Idle’s lyrics has been updated for the social media age: “We’re going off to war/ We’ll have girlfriends by the shore/ We’ll make TikToks of the gore.” The knights who say “Ni” eventually become the knights who say—something something “Angela Bassett did the thing.” Last Saturday, the scene-stealing Kritzer, in her Liza-inspired lounge act bit during “Knights of the Round Table,” even managed to drop a Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift reference. One suspects that Kritzer, a natural comic who can wring a laugh from a simple key change—e.g., in the purposely lengthy power-ballad parody “The Song That Goes Like This”—gets some leeway to improvise, especially in her Act 2 showstopper, “Diva’s Lament” (aka “Whatever Happened to My Part?”).
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Speaking of Act 2 showstoppers: There are a few—starting with the crowd-pleaser “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the British music-hall ditty made famous in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And perhaps most memorably, there’s “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway,” Sir Robin’s patter song explaining what every good Broadway musical needs: “There simply must be, Arthur, trust me/ Simply must be Jews.” It’s a massive production number incorporating a Fiddler on the Roof parody, a Streisand impersonator, and Michael Urie on a chair doing his best “Mein Herr,” and yes, it lands differently in November 2023. (There’s also, alas, a sound issue, which seems to be a St. James Theatre problem; the singers were getting drowned out during Into the Woods as well.) You can feel the audience asking themselves, Is it okay to laugh? Is the song offensive? For that matter, is it any more or less offensive than the disco-tastic number “His Name Is Lancelot,” which is basically one big gay stereotype wrapped in Lycra?
No judgment here. But if you don’t chuckle over the lyric “There’s a very small percentile/ Who enjoys a dancing gentile,” I promise—I will judge you.
Spamalot opened Nov. 16, 2023, at the St. James Theatre. Tickets and information: spamalotthemusical.com
