Everybody who goes to the theater with any frequency wants to be in on a hit. A real hit—like the first night of My Fair Lady must have felt, or Oklahoma! And most seasons the closest you come is a show you sense is vaguely good for you—a Wicked or a Ragtime or late Sondheim or the legions of Sondheim clones, shows you admire rather than enjoy. And, after a while, a critic begins to feel a little guilty about all the unenjoyable shows he’s admired for free and then suckered the paying customers into ponying up $101.50 per ticket into suffering through.

Which preamble is by way of saying that, every year or two on Broadway, a lot of pressure builds up to declare a real hit, and like a boil it has to be lanced. This spring’s lance is Spamalot, which has a lot of lances, as well as a Lancelot (a gay Lancelot, naturally). And, at the Shubert Theatre, it’s become the happy beneficiary of Broadway’s perennial desperation to find an authentic smash. In The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz even went so far as to posit an entire new Golden Age on the peg of Spamalot’s triumphant notices, in a feature headlined, “Musicals Are Back!” In the collected works, this will make a nice companion piece to his Weekly Standard column on the opening of the movie Chicagoa couple of years ago proclaiming the return of the Hollywood musical. Hollywood musicals