Word: songfulness
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Attendees of the Chicago Sinfonietta's 20th anniversary season performance on Oct. 1 and 2 will be asked to do something unusual: turn on their cell phones. Quirky chimes, song melodies and ring tones will be the concert's opening notes...
...Throughout, Idle devises numbers that are both parodies and evocations of popular songs. Idle's been writing this sort of ditty for decades. At Cambridge he did a song called "I Like Chinese" ("They only come up to your knees") that he reprised at the Hollywood Bowl. In his Flying Circus days he'd start with the verbal legerdemain of a highbrow-sounding verse ("Can a bee be said to be / Or not to be an entire bee / When half the bee is not a bee / Due to some ancient injury") with a simple chorus...
...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...
...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...
...Spamalot it's often hard to tell whether the stypefyingly simple lyrics and false rhymes ("So be strong / Keep right on / To the end / Of your song / Do not fail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail") a joke on the banality of such songs? Or is it the real thing, a straightforwardly banal inspirational? Which is not to say that a song can't also be what it makes fun of - that a faux-inspirational song can't be inspirational and incorrigibly, addictively, sing-alongable. Remember that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" became...