Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I saw two shows, Monty Python’s Spamalot and Belfast Blues. Unlike most of the rest of the world, I preferred the second to the first–strongly:
“Spamalot” stars Tim Curry (of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fame) and David Hyde Pierce (of “Frasier” fame) and is directed by Mike Nichols (of universal fame). Furthermore, I don’t doubt that every Monty Python buff in the greater New York area has already bought a ticket. So it is with regret and some surprise that I must report the following bad news: It’s a bore….
So what went wrong? For openers, the new songs are mostly Broadway genre parodies that aren’t knowing enough to be more than mildly amusing. “The Song That Goes Like This,” for example, is a toothless sendup of the faceless first-act ballads with which so many contemporary musicals are afflicted: “A sentimental song/That casts a magic spell/They all will hum along/We’ll overact like hell.” (Memo to Mr. Idle: Meta is so over.) As for the bright-young-collegiate humor of the book, most of which comes straight from the film, it’s both dated and unexpectedly slow-moving. TV-style comedy zips along much faster now than it did when “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was made, and I found myself squirming in my seat as each bit was dragged out to its well-remembered conclusion, wondering why my 19-year-old self had found the same punch lines so funny….
Belfast Blues, Geraldine Hughes’ one-woman play about growing up amid the Irish Troubles, is a very different story:
It’s a well-written, grippingly acted piece of work. I even liked it despite being severely allergic to Irish whimsy, in which Ms. Hughes sometimes indulges to excess (she needs to ease off on the wide eyes). For the most part, though, she paints a tough-minded portrait of life in a violent land reduced to collective dementia by the evil confluence of religious zealotry and class resentment….
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