Musical ()<\/p>\n
If there is a plot to this romp, it’s that Arthur discovers the Lady in the Lake who gives him the sword which leads to his kingship and not long afterwards to connecting up with Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot. They take off on the quest for the Holy Grail, which, before long, turns into a quest for writing a successful musical.<\/p>\n
The virtue of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and all of the attendant films including Life of Bryan and Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, is its tight-lipped British humor seasoned with anarchic rambunctiousness. That combination was a devilishly succesfful one that enabled Monty Python’s great team – John Cleese, Eric Idle, **** – to succeed at putting forth a wonderfully wild repertoire that had its own distinctive tone and style. For those who love Monty Python, there is nothing quite like its fusion of utter silliness with erudition and posed formality that frames it all.<\/p>\n
This musical, written by Python Eric Idle, takes many of the themes of the original shows and films, and gloms them together with a loose narrative that it spoofs on, especially in the second half, and adds some not very distinctive music to it. <\/p>\n
The staging of this production seems oddly flat and linear, with sets that are quite straightfoward and do not move too much, and a form of general design and choreography that does not enliven things much beyond that. There is some good acting in this show – *** as King Arthur is robust and compelling, and *** as Lancelot gives a good broad rendition – but overall the show is fairly discombobulated. What made Monty Python shows and films attractive were that they were intentionally anarchic, which was appealing and funny. Here, the show just seems to ramble on and fall apart at a lot of places.<\/p>\n
It is slower in the first half, where the more general King Arthur spoofs are presented. In the second half, when the fourth wall collapses and there is a lot more focus on what it means to produce a successful musical, things pick up, but at an odd cost. There is a long song about the role of Jews in Broadway production which is, of course, tasteless, and could be funnier that it is. There is plenty of Broadway stuff which is tasteless – almost all of The Book of Mormon<\/em> qualifies – but that is genuinely funny. So, even though the pace picks up in the second half, it does so at the expense of what made Monty Python so great – its artful combination of restraint and anarchy within the tight bounds of an aesthetic of British-style humor. Here, those boundaries are exploded, and not for the best.<\/p>\n A lot of the Monty Python shtick is included in the script – spam, of course, from the Spam, spam, spam, spam…<\/em> routine, the clopping coconut shell horses, and a bunch of other stuff. There is a lot of weirdly antiquated gay-related spoofing that goes on, with Sir Lancelot depicted as a gay guy. One funny line does emerge, when one of the gay characters – of course set in the Middle Ages – self-reflects and says it’s odd that this will still be controversial a thousand years from now<\/em>. That truly is funny.<\/p>\n There is also a lot of pop culture reference, including medleys of songs from Whitney Houston and others, which are irrelevant to the plot but which seem to curry favor with a willing audience. And there are also cheap but popularly appealing references to local Boston things, which gets a big rise from audiences. It must be a full time job for the writers to come up with this stuff for every venue.<\/p>\n Some Monty Python fans may be charmed by the look back, which others may be daunted by the lack of real dedication to the Monty Python esthetic. I am more in the latter camp, but found some of the performances appealing and enjoyed some of the perkiness of the second half even though it represented a greater departure from the traditional Monty Python gaggery.<\/p>\n – BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Musical (2005)
\nMusic, Lyrics and Book by Eric Idle
\nMusic by John Du Prez
\nBoch Center – Wang Theater
\nTheater District, Boston
\nOctober 8-11, 2026<\/strong>
\nA spoofy version of the already spoofy Monty Python shtick, based loosely on the plot of the film about the search for the Holy Grail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-musicals","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38573"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38635,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38573\/revisions\/38635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}