Word: python
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...caring more for their pets than for their children, the Royal Family seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class. They might be the extended clan of Wallace and Gromit or cousins of Mrs. Proposition and Mrs. Conclusion, the shrill suburban housewives from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's as if the Windsors want to prove that although they're worth billions and practically define the term "idle rich," they share the tatty taste and myopic world-view of Britain's petty bourgeoisie. The grocer and the schoolteacher can look...
...waist and looped over once - on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon this place was belt city. There were the early adapters: magazine editors teetering out of the Four Season?s hotel with brown belts cinching their silk frocks. Then at runway shows like Trussardi?s, bright red or yellow python belts were wrapped around and around Grecian-style silk jersey dresses. By the time Gucci designer Frida Giannini opened her 6pm show on a mirrored runway, the appearance of a tight, high-waisted weight-lifting kind of belt was no surprise. A few hours later Rosella Tarabini, the jolly designer...
...When the show can't recreate the film, it plunders the Python repertoire for correlatives. Instead of the mock-Swedish subtitles from the film's opening, the show begins with a Finnish fish-slapping dance - this from a song Palin wrote called "Finland" and a bit in episode 28, when John and Michael ritually smite each other with fish to the music of Edward German. Later, a sound-off marching song flicks a reference to Palin's "Lumberjack Song" with the shouted cadence: "Become a knight and you'll go far / In suspenders...
...course, the signature Python tendency was to 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...
...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 and finally to be cherished in dewy memory. The Idle show returns the Python troupe to their...