Who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it

I celebrated yesterday's post on live theater and music by going to see some live theater last night. Well, I don't know if "theater" is stretching it a bit, since it was a Broadway musical, but it was definitely in a theater. It was Spamalot, the only broadway musical that I was really at all interested in seeing, having spent an enormous amount of my time in high school watching and memorizing (through both effort and repetition) The Holy Grail and every episode of Flying Circus that I could manage to see in those pre-DVD days.

The group that I went with would have been a good focus group for the show's marketers. We had someone who knew nothing about Monty Python, someone who knew far too much about Monty Python, and pretty much everything in between. The general verdict? The person who didn't know anything about Monty Python loved it and couldn't stop laughing the entire time. The person who knew too much about it (me, obviously) really enjoyed it, but most of the funniest jokes were straight from The Holy Grail.

A lazy list:

• The only new parts that improved at all on the original were what the Knights Who Say Ni change to when they are no longer the Knights Who Say Ni. It involved a good long minute of barking and it was hilarious. Also, the guy who did the French knight was (can I say it?) just as good as John Cleese, and there were some great additions that bit.
• Not appearing in this play: the witch scene, Sir Galahad's quest and the bridge. The rabbit scene was in there, and it has to be seen to believed how well they recreated it.
• I had heard beforehand that there's a lot of satire about musicals, and it's definitely there. All of the songs had the cheesy sound of Broadway, but with self-satirizing lyrics. I'm not about to run out to buy the OCR, but it was very entertaining.
• A lot of the special effects (what do you call it in plays?) were pretty amazing. The timing and excecution of some of the stunts (the cow-tapult over the castle, the rabbit biting a head off) were amazing. I'm sure that if I had a chance to see it a few more times, I could see more clearly how it was done, but one time...it was flawless

We capped this all off by a post-show backstage tour by one of the shows's dancers, a very lovely (not too surprisingly) and friendly young lady who's related to one of my sister's coworkers and offered to give us a quick tour. Seeing the backstage, and all the carefully-arranged props and trying to imagine it all in motion was incredible. I saw the dressing rooms, clapped some of the coconuts together when no one was looking, was shown some Vegas-style caps for the dancers which we were informed "cost $5000 each", saw the cramped pit (would have killed to play that drumset) and saw a hand-made sign that said, "Members of P.E.T.A.: People Eating Tasty Animals". The logo that was painted on the traveling cases was the best part, and sadly not available in the gift store: a skull-and-crossbones but with the killer rabbit's skull in its place.

The tour was fairly quick, because it was delaying our guide from getting to the cast party at a certain Washington strip club to celebrate the birthday of the guy who played Patsy (and who was my favorite part of the play). Guess what strip club the cast of Spamalot went to? Just guess.