Word: broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chorus Line is probably the best Broadway musical that I didn't want to see revived...
...want to concentrate on Idle, whose chameleonic nature and gift of easy musicality made him a natural to make a hit Broadway show out of MP&HG. I only want to look at the early lives and Idle and the others, since by the time they left their universities they somehow seemed fully formed and Python-ready...
...sketch altogether. Python skits programmed their own self-destruction; they'd be aborted midway with no punch line in sight. Indeed, MP&HG ends with Arthur and his Knights cantering out of the Dark Ages into modern Britain, where the film sputters brazenly to its close. But a Broadway show moves irrevocably toward cues for applause, either at the end of a scene or for the climax of a song. The crowd at a musical expects to applaud, they want to applaud. And we already know that applause is something Idle enjoys hearing...
...Idle has said that he was encouraged to musicalize MP&HG after seeing Mel Brooks' stage version of The Producers. The was the show that reminded Broadway that its strong suit was musical comedy, and not the dour Les Miz and Phantom and Sondheims and the rest of the sing-song drama lot. In Spamalot, as in The Producers, everything is absolutely spot-on and studiously ingratiating. Idle's show isn't desperate to please, really; rather, it's confident that everything it does will provide pleasure...
...this, and the expert work of Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria and Ramirez, well and truly earned Spamalot last year's prize for Best Musical. And it may well sweep the Olivier Awards next spring. Which is fine by me, since I'm as fond of saucy Broadway musicals as of silly-smart British TV comedy. If an impudent young satire like Monty Python and the Holy Grail should mellow into a fat and happy Spamalot, that's just the normal lifespan of transgressive pop culture: first to be dismissed as shocking, then to be accepted as trailblazing...