The Dressing

The antics of Monty Python have never been entertaining to the Dresser who does not groove on comedy that is chaotic, scatological, violent, and cheeky in that overly smart way that runs puns like a battering ram through the doorway of a listener’s mind. However, numerous friends and family members who have seen the successful Broadway musical Spamalot convinced the Dresser to have a look. So on December 12, 2007, she attend the national touring production at Washington, DC’s National Theatre starring Michael Siberry as King Arthur and Esther Stilwell as the Lady of the Lake and is shocked to say, she had a good time and ventures there is something in this show for everyone.

HOW CAN THIS BE?

Which side of this question should the Dresser address first? Bright side of the moon—what makes Spamalot different from other Python creations? Dark side of the moon—how could the Dresser dislike the smart, innovative, and groundbreaking comedy of the British collective known since October 5, 1969, when their first BBC TV show aired as Monty Python?

Having caught the Python spirit, the Dresser will moon logic and leap into the middle of this two-act, twenty-scene play running two hours and twenty-two minutes with one interval (hey! That’s British speak for intermission). Just in case, Dear Reader, you don’t know, Spamalot, written by Eric Idle (book, lyrics) and John Du Pres & Eric Idle (music), is based on King Arthur (and his Knights of the Round Table) chasing after the Holy Grail in order to achieve the utopia of Camelot.


What the Dresser likes best about Spamalot, which has a lot in common with the 2001 acclaimed musical The Producers by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, is the scene where King Arthur gets the shrubbery needed to appease the huge Knight of Ni who is making passage through the “very expensive forest” impossible for King A. A is now alone with his sidekick Patsy, after he and all the Round Table knights were run off by a chorus line of abusive Frenchmen and can caners at the end of Act I. How A gets his shrubbery is that Sir Galahad’s mom (a fiercesome, stout woman with pendulous sagging breasts) strolls into the forest dragging her wagon (with shrubbery) like Bertol Brecht’s Mother Courage.

Oh, has the Dresser mentioned that for the most part in all things Monty Python that women are mostly sex objects and men who don’t meet a certain school boy standard are fairies—as in, feminine creatures with wings, well, not exactly fairies but fags, uh, you know men who prefer men or boys? This is precisely why the Dresser was delighted to see Galahad’s mum solve the King’s problem. Hold on, but wasn’t it the Lady of Lake who dispatched Arthur on his quest?


Yes, the scantily clad Lady of Lake and her cheerleading troupe of Laker Girls. Lady of Lake is a mover and shaker, but in the end all she really wants, despite her complaining in the song “The Diva’s Complaint,” is to marry the king.

WHO’S YOUR JEW?

Besides there being something to please everyone in this musical, the Dresser is certain there is also something to offend or confuse everyone in Spamalot. Take for example, the Knight of Ni’s second demand of Arthur that he produce a successful Broadway musical. (If this sounds like The Producers, go with this impulse.) This demand leads to the revelation by the fairy-est Round Table knight Sir Robin that you have to have a Jew involved in order to make it on Broadway.


(Does this sound something like a lead into Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden, the fictional musical within The Producers? Maybe.) The long and short of Arthur’s next quest—to find a Jew—is that Patsy, his sensible Sancho Panza to Arthur’s kooky Don Quixote, admits that he, Patsy, is a Jew, but only after he blurts that It wasn’t so easy to say this to a “heavily armed Christian.”