My wife and I saw Eric Idle's reworking of "The Holy Grail" into a Broadway musical. It worked. It was funny, it kept many of the best bits from the movie in it. The coconuts for horse sounds, the argument about how he got a coconut, the Knights who say Neet, the big nasty evil bunny rabbit and they added from "Life of Brian" the song "Always look on the bright side of life".
Broken into two acts it was full of musical numbers to keep the show going and oddly enough had an actual ending as opposed to the movie it was based on.
A well done show, with enough dancing, singing and humor to make almost anyone happy.
There were two things that struck me. First off the audience, a pretty wide array of age groups, but there was also an older group (yes people are older then even I am) and I was a little surprised to see them signing up and paying $70 plus dollars for a ticket to see this show.
The second thing (which is related to the first) is that on some level it is sad when you have lived long enough to see counter-culture humor become main stream. It some how feels different when it goes main stream. A little bit of a sell-out or more so, that it took society awhile to catch up with Monthy Python. Still it was funny, but loses some of the edge and irreverent feel that it had before.
I was especially impressed with the actual theatre itself, as I never been in the renovated Hippodrome in Baltimore. They did a great job and it is a wonderful venue.
I was also happy to note how well they manged to keep so much of Terry Gilliam's touch with the old cut out pictures that he used for production design. They incorporated enough of it to keep the Monty Python feel to it.
Grade B
A B? Are you kidding? Funniest Broadway show I've ever seen. "This is the Song that Goes Like This"? Come on, you can't beat that.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about the show you saw, but the initial audience discomfort when they started on the hunt for a Jew so they could take the show to Broadway was amusing in and of itself. As it went on you could tell who was Jewish in the audience, as they were the first to laugh at the inside jokes.
My only dissapointment with the show was that they cut out the witch test. Loved that part of the movie. I'd give it an A-.