‘Spamalot’ Review: An Overdone Broadway Revival Opts for Excess Over Ingenuity
variety.comNaveen Kumar It may be appropriate for a musical with “spam” in the title to feel canned. But it’s a shame that the first Broadway revival of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” now playing at the St.
James Theatre, struggles to find anything fresh about material covered in a half-century of dust. A comedy broader than a bowling alley, “Spamalot” premiered on Broadway in 2005, 30 years after the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” from which the creators say it is “lovingly ripped off.” The British troupe’s devotion to wordplay, absurdity and bodily function was vintage even then.
Like a pile of corpses that bursts into song, some tenants of comedy never die. But they do lose their vigor. Director and choreographer Josh Rhodes’ production, which originated at the Kennedy Center this spring, is more frenzied regurgitation than reinvention, opting at every turn for showy bells and whistles over original interpretation.
The result suggests insecurity about whether the show holds up when what we need is an argument that it does. Aside from a few timely winks to TikTok and Ozempic, the book and lyrics by Monty Python vet Eric Idle (who collaborated on the music with John Du Prez) leans heavily on nostalgia for various layers of IP dating all the way back to the fifth century.
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