Tag: spamalot

#oneaday Day 509: Ham and Jam and…

Today I went to see the musical Spamalot. That may be the sort of way that a primary school child starts their school camp diary (assuming part of said school camp involved going to see Spamalot, which would immediately make it much better than my school camp) but at least it’s factually accurate — today I did indeed go and see Spamalot.

Spamalot is, of course, the musical based loosely on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the most irritatingly-oft-quoted movies of all time. The show plays up on this by incorporating a number of the movie’s most memorable quotes whilst wrapping it in an all new crispy coating of musical theatre.

The production we saw today featured Phill Jupitus as King Arthur. I’ve not seen him on stage before but I’ve always been a fan of him on shows such as Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and his likeable persona brought a lot to the character of Arthur — particularly as there was a bit of inadvertent corpsing on several occasions, evidence that the show is likely coming towards the end of its run.

The show itself is great. My lovely ladyfriend introduced me to the soundtrack a few weeks back and I found myself returning to it on Spotify regularly, so we decided to check it out. The stage show in the UK is somewhat different from the US-centric soundtrack — the song about never succeeding on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews is conspicuously absent, replaced by the not-so-subtle “you’ll never succeed in showbiz if you don’t have any stars”.

The cast were good and played their parts with appropriate levels of aplomb. And, in the tradition of all good tongue-in-cheek musicals, the show succeeds because it’s not only an excellent spoof of the musical genre in general, it’s also a good musical, with some excellently memorable tunes, good pacing and a suitably huge-sounding finale.

So, basically, if you get the opportunity to go and see Spamalot, then you should. It’s rather good.

#oneaday Day 122: Musical Theatre is Gay

I’d write about the fact Osama bin Laden is dead, but it’s probably already been done to death from every possible angle, whether it’s the morbid nature of the celebration of death, or the woefully ill-informed Facebook status updates that resulted from the event. It’s a big deal, of course, but I’m not going to write about it.

No, I’m going to write about how gay musical theatre is. Your interpretation of what I mean by the word “gay” is entirely up to you, thereby absolving me of any responsibility for inappropriate usage.

Anyway. Musical theatre. It’s one of those things that despite myself I find myself liking a great deal — at least the good ones, anyway. And by “good ones”, I mean ones with catchy tunes, preferably with some stupidly silly big chorus numbers that make a massive deal out of something relatively mundane, possibly with tap dancing.

The reason I’m thinking about musical theatre is, of course, partly due to the fact that I saw Chicago at the weekend, and partly due to the fact that I spent most of my 3 hour drive home last night listening to the Spamalot soundtrack. These represent two polar opposites of the musical theatre spectrum — Chicago is pretty serious, though it does have elements of comedy, and is pretty abstract by virtue of the fact that there’s no set, everyone female is dressed in lacy black lingerie throughout and everyone male is dressed in tight waistcoats, trousers and displaying rippling man-torsos. Spamalot, on the other hand, I haven’t seen, but the soundtrack is very much aware of the absurdity of musical theatre and embraces it to produce a particularly enjoyable selection of songs.

Not every musical gets it right, of course. I had the misfortune to listen to some of Whistle Down the Wind at one point and found it immensely tedious to listen to, and also it had crap piano parts. It left me with no desire to go and see the show — it might actually be good, but the fact the music was so dull and morose made me actively want to avoid it altogether.

Also, the presence of Andrew Lloyd Webber on every reality TV show vaguely connected to musical theatre makes me want to avoid anything he’s ever done. Although he does use more interesting key signatures than a lot of other composers, though that doesn’t make his stuff inherently “better”. That’s like saying Gears of War is better than Recettear because there are more polygons. Also, you probably know my stance on Gears of War by now.

I probably have a point somewhere, but the faint delirium of still being pretty tired is causing it to vanish into the ether somewhere. I shall attempt to sum up what may be my point, then, by saying that I, a heterosexual male completely comfortable in my own sexuality (except when on Twitter, when a number of people bring out a frankly terrifying amount of latent gayness) enjoy musicals and have absolutely no shame in this whatsoever.

And they are totally gay. Because they make me smile and fill me with joy.

Hah. See what I did there? I took the word “gay” and… oh, never mind. It just sounds like I like gay things now. Which, if you raid my iTunes library, probably isn’t that far from the truth.