Hark — do you hear clippety-clop, clippety-clop? Is it horses’ hooves? Or the staccato percussive beat of coconut shells? Undoubtedly the latter, as the brave knights of Monty Python’s Spamalot (“A New Musical Lovingly Ripped Off from the Motion Picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail ”) are headed to town for the debut of their national tour. They’ll park their steeds at the Colonial Theatre starting March 7, and they’ll not leave until laughter rings throughout the kingdom.
These knights come heavily laureled. The musical, helmed by Mike Nichols, with book by Eric Idle and music and lyrics by Idle and John Du Prez, won three 2005 Tony Awards including those for best musical and best director. And the soundtrack album just picked up a Grammy. Steve Wynn is planning to build a theater for Spamalot in Las Vegas.
It’s spam, spam, spam everywhere, but there are extra helpings for Michael Siberry, whose King Arthur, he says, is “struggling to maintain his dignity against all odds.” He adds, “I go along gathering knights and keep the plot — such as it is — on track.”
Ah, the plot. Idle had been thinking about this project for some time when he called up long-time Python composer/collaborator John Du Prez, who’d been involved with the group since 1978, when he composed music for The Life of Brian . “When Eric called me in 2002 and said, ‘I’ve written a script for Monty Python and the Holy Grail — The Musical . I want to call it Spamalot ,’ I laughed for five minutes.”
But Idle, as Du Prez recalls over the phone from London, was dead serious. “He did a wonderful job with the book — he put plot back in and he got wonderful roles for women. He put emotion in an emotion-free zone.”
Spamalot , Du Prez continues, is a far cry from an earlier idea for a musical that Idle had drawn from his stint as Koko in Jonathan Miller’s 1987 production of The Mikado . “Every day he would buy the newspaper and put whatever was in the news into his song every night. And he had an idea called Back Page , a musical about royalty, cricket, and sex, the three things the British love the best.”
The music was one arena in which Idle and Du Prez might impose emotion, and writing the score for a show set in AD 932 afforded a lot of stylistic leeway. Of course, since this is Python, the lyrics were essential. “An awful lot is rhythm and stress — it’s like the punch line,” Du Prez says.
But he adds that an essential ingredient of the success of Spamalot was the “valuable pieces of experience” gained from Idle’s two solo tours, which included the 2003 Greedy Bastard Tour. “We were waiting for Mike Nichols. The show was Eric talking about his own life, and we were getting this feel for what works in the theater and what works for American audiences. So by the time we went into rehearsal, we had 30-city tours under our belts. Like the Marx Brothers used to do.”
SPAMALOT | March 7-April 15 | Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, Boston | $37.50-$90 | 617.931.ARTS or www.ticketmaster.com
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On the Web:
Spamalot: http://www.montypythonsspamalot.com
