Entertainment News
2006-02-23
Tim Curry
accompanies Spamalot to London
Proudly boasting
he had lovingly ripped off the cult movie Monty Python
and the Holy Grail , Eric Idle launched his
Proudly boasting
he had lovingly ripped off the cult movie Monty Python
and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle launched his
quirky musical Spamalot in London on Tuesday,
hoping to match its record-breaking Broadway run. With
flatulent Frenchmen, killer rabbits, and a legless knight,
the supreme silliness of Monty Python returns home to
the United Kingdom in October with Tim Curry
reprising his Broadway role as King Arthur. Next
January, Simon Russell Beale, currently playing the part in
New York, will take over. The show has been taking in
around $1 million a week and won three Tony awards
last year, including best musical.
Offering launch
party guests Spam sandwiches, badges bearing the slogan
"I fart in your general direction," and a sing-along chorus
of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," Idle
reveled in mocking showbiz hype. He brought one of the
producers onstage to sign a check, quipping, "That's a
rare enough sight on Broadway," and he got the set
designer to shine a flashlight on tiny Polaroid shots of the
lavish set designs.
Idle said
director Mike Nichols only won a Tony award for the Broadway
production "by shamelessly spreading rumors that he was
dying." Quashing press reports that some of his fellow
stars in the '70s British TV comedy classic series
were not that enamored by Spamalot, Idle said, "We
persuaded the Pythons to go along with it."
John Cleese was
cited in the press handout notes as saying he was
delighted at seeing some songs "skewered
definitively—it was liberating." "It is a
crowd-pleaser, is what it is," fellow Python Terry
Gilliam was quoted as saying. Michael Palin had "a
feeling of great, ebullient, and redeeming silliness."
Idle told the
launch audience: "I am the sixth nicest of the
ex-Pythons and certainly the cheapest. I didn't want to do
this for a living," he added, setting up one of the
Pythons' most famous lines—"I wanted to be a
lumberjack."
Asked why he
chose to launch the musical in New York City before London,
he said: "I went away to make a fortune in the United
States, where the people are less discerning and the
critics more bribable." But he did confess to being
tempted into a name change before opening night after
Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a friend while
out quail hunting. "Dick Cheney will probably be
calling it Monty Python and the Holy Quail," he said.
(Paul Majendie, Reuters)
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