Word: mp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When people say it's undergraduate humor I think they're wrong," Jones says of the Python style. "It's postgraduate humor." (Like MP&HG, which grew out of Jones' study of Chaucer.) Yet the adolescence factor can't be dismissed. Squint a little, and you could see the Pythons as British versions of the American college jocks who reached their apex of glory and achievement as young men, then went into real estate, coasting on their lingering allure. It's true, anyway, if we see the TV show and Holy Grail as an extension of the glamorous days Jones...
...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...
...When the show opened, Idle was exactly twice as old as he was when MP&HG was shot back in '74. If the old saying is true - that we become what we once mocked - then the Idle of Spamalot isn't too far from the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" pub character in the early Flying Circus days. He wants everyone in the theater to get it, get it? This is clear from the show's brief overture, with oompah tubas and tiptoeing xylophones practically poking the audience in the ribs to announce what follows will be musical comedy stopping just...
...stop the action and question it, impudently and irrelevantly, in terms scientific ("Where'd Arthur get his coconuts?") or political ("Who elected Him king?"), before abandoning the 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...
...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...