Shamelessly recreating the talk around my seventh-grade lunch table—thanks to the efforts of my pals and me, “It’s just a flesh wound!” entered the language—Monty Python’s Spamalot (now playing at the St. James Theatre) is a bouncy, cheesy, glitzy, altogether lovable revival of the 2005 show, which in turn adapted the 1975 midnight movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Restaging all of the movie’s funniest scenes, with hunks of dialogue taken verbatim (I know this because I memorized the screenplay as a boy), the stage version is a highlight of a young Broadway season that is taking more and more breaks from didactic identity politics and slowly emerging from this decade of cultural mental lockdown.
Essentially a stage celebration of all things Monty Python, the revival of Spamalot comes to us from the Kennedy Center, where it played on a trial run last spring. This brings to one the number of good things that have occurred in Washington this decade. In A.D. 932, Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart), unregally getting around on a pretend horse while his servant Patsy (Christopher Fitzgerald) knocks coconuts together, goes on a search for the grail that will bring him in contact with some of Python’s funniest characters, notably Tim the Enchanter, the leader of the Knights Who Say Ni, and the French Taunter, all of whom are played by Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam in one of the stage’s most laugh-dense acting turns. Both Arthur and Sir Galahad, otherwise known as “Dennis” (Nik Walker), are played by black actors, which yields a fresh opportunity for an unexpectedly good-humored race joke. As in the original movie, the French Taunter (“I unclog my nose at you!”) who claims to be keeping the grail behind his fortress walls refers to the Round Table lads as “filthy English kuh-niggots,” which the black actors take to be a slur. It’s merely the Frenchman’s mispronunciation of “knights,” though, and the double-take earns a cheerful laugh. High spirits all around; no need for anyone to file a complaint to the nearest dei officer.
Eric Idle, who learned about musical composition from his friend George Harrison, and his writing partner John du Prez—whose association with Python goes all the way back to 1979’s Life of Brian (which Harrison personally financed)—have fashioned a brisk two-hour-and-twenty-minute show (including intermission) by padding out the grail story with bits and pieces from other Python routines, such as the opening Michael Palin tune “Fisch Schlapping Song (Finland)” from the troupe’s 1980 Contractual Obligation Album (the number, full of Scandinavian joviality, ends abruptly when someone reminds us that we’re supposed to be in England). The showstopper is “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the song that taught us all to keep our chins up in the event of crucifixion, from Life of Brian. The original numbers are little more than ditties to provide a canvas for the jokey lyrics, but in situ, combined with the roaring good cheer of the cast, they function nicely.
“He Is Not Dead Yet,” sung by a chorus of corpses loaded onto a wagon after being knocked off by plague, is a spiffy singalong, the mock-ballad “The Song That Goes Like This” (heard twice) is sly and polished, and the jolly “Find Your Grail” (also played twice) contains useful advice to get a purpose in life. All recapture the spirit of childlike glee that attracted me and my grade-school friends. Josh Rhodes, the director and choreographer, devises a series of lively dances and engineers some fresh jokes (there’s a reference to the bounced congressman George Santos that, although it doesn’t quite work, at least is current, as is an Ozempic punch line). The actors, especially Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as the spotlight-chasing Lady of the Lake (numbers include “The Diva’s Lament,” in which she sings about not having a big enough part), have been instructed to play everything like Excalibur in the stone: to the hilt.
As if to remind us that New York is roughly halfway between England and Las Vegas, the show includes plenty of self-consciously flashy staging, such as pretty chorus girls in glittering bikinis (Broadway’s recent obsession with larding up the chorus with candidates for an Ozempic prescription appears to be fading out) and a very Vegas improvised break when Kritzer does a brief stand-up comedy act in which the riffs leave her fellow actors struggling not to break character and laugh along with the audience. I have only one word of caution to theatergoers: don’t choose seat C101, unless you wish to be part of the show.
Those who have a strong preference for tidiness over disorder would have been well advised to pop an Ativan before settling in for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s world premiere of I Need That (which closed December 30 at the American Airlines Theatre). Danny DeVito plays an old codger in New Jersey living amid what might as well be the contents of several Salvation Army stores that got swept up in a cyclone and had their contents funneled into a single living room. Clothes, magazines, books, and a thousand other types of bric-à-brac jostle each other for supremacy on every inch of the stage. For sheer quantity of items, Alexander Dodge’s set design must shatter some kind of record. If a junkyard can be spectacular, Dodge has made it so.
That’s the only memorable element of this insistently mediocre comic play, however. Theresa Rebeck, a longtime television writer (her credits include NYPD Blue and Smash, which she created and from which she was fired after a year), stands as the most-produced on-Broadway female playwright of this century, and yet if a drama student delivered this play to his professor, a reasonable response would be, “You’ve got potential, keep going,” rather than “I’m in awe. This is a finished work that deserves to be staged at the highest levels.” Producing it at all, much less on Broadway, where new straight plays are scarce, was a baffling choice. The director Moritz von Stuelpnagel does his best with it, but, like many nonprofits, the Roundabout seems to have a less than tenacious grasp of quality.
DeVito, who was superb in a small role on the same stage a few years ago in the 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price, is, as ever, disarming and cute as the widower Sam, who when the curtain rises seems himself a hunk of junk, hidden under a blanket in a room so stuffed with stuff that there is nowhere for a visitor to sit. He is so loath to part with possessions that he even has a bottle cap that’s more than sixty years old. “That’s worth somethin’!” is a frequent comment about his hoarded items to his friend and neighbor Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas), who drops by for the occasional visit with a croissant but is mainly present as an audience surrogate, to give Sam a means of explaining himself. Amelia—Sam’s exasperated daughter, who is competently played by DeVito’s forty-year-old actual daughter Lucy—also visits, to inform her father that things are on the verge of a crisis. Thanks to a nosy neighbor, authorities have been alerted to how Sam lives (that he hasn’t had the grass cut in eight months has also raised eyebrows). So he has only days to clear up the premises lest his home be condemned as unsafe by the fire department, which could force him out of his nest, presumably with the vast majority of his possessions thrown out anyway. In short, the situation is a mess.
Ah, but Sam’s detritus is his collective memory as he enters the final stage of existence. He has a set of board games from his youth, which he shared with seven siblings. Sorry! and Monopoly preserve his link with them, and with his early years. He tells a story about an engagement ring he found while calling bingo games in a church hall sixty-odd years ago. An electric guitar leads to fond, touching recollections of a soldier Sam once knew who committed suicide and left behind the instrument, autographed by Link Wray (a rocker whose single “Rumble,” a hit in 1958, is sampled in the play). A stack of books? Those belonged to his beloved wife, Ginny, who lost her mind and died years ago. In short, throwing away anything would be throwing away a piece of himself. Rebeck goes so far as to insert a few late lines of dialogue to spell out this theme, which is clear enough without being expressly stated. Even at a single act of an hour and forty-five minutes, the play seems overstretched and tedious. All it really has going for it, besides the set, is the effort DeVito makes to wring comic value out of thin air with his line readings (he makes a feast out of the word “Cleveland,” a city that escapes his admiration, and which he insists even sounds unattractive). The point that Sam’s possessions are his memories does very little to create a dramatic structure and seems obvious anyway. In an especially wan attempt to manufacture significance, Rebeck has characters say “This is America!” every fifteen minutes or so, as if our culture’s supposed materialism is the true villain. Are there no pack rats in Russia, or China? Apparently living in a junkyard is the fault of (American) capitalism, which famously produces lots of stuff, though capitalism is also blamed for producing disposable stuff and the lack of ability to dispose of things is Sam’s chief problem. Rebeck doesn’t delve into the idea to any depth, however, possibly because she senses that it doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, and for that I’m grateful.
In need of something like a plot twist, Rebeck tosses in a couple of late, contrived machinations that reveal Sam’s daughter as more like the old man than she appears—which is completely wrong for the character—and create the potential for a fresh beginning for Sam, which at his age seems unlikely. (DeVito is seventy-nine, and looks it. How many near-octogenarians are receptive to the idea of rebooting their lives?) The play lurches to a surprise ending.
Did I mention that Rebeck, who is sixty-five, is the most-produced female playwright of the century, at least on Broadway? Her previous credits include Bernhardt/Hamlet (2018), Dead Accounts (2012), Seminar (2011), and Mauritius (2007). Never heard of any of them? There might be a reason for that.
Can an entire musical be assembled from the kinds of inspirational sayings associated with throw pillows and kitchen magnets? Michael John LaChiusa gives it a try with The Gardens of Anuncia (which was at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center through December 31), an almost mesmerizingly bland tribute to an elderly friend of his. Graciela Daniele is an eighty-four-year-old Argentina-born Broadway figure who made her name as the choreographer of such productions as The Pirates of Penzance (1981) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985) before moving on to directing, among others, a 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun. LaChiusa, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for this effort as well as for a long string of forgotten musicals—Hello Again (1994), Marie Christine (1999), The Wild Party (2000; book cowritten by George C. Wolfe)—became friends with Daniele when she directed some of his work for Lincoln Center, where she was director-in-residence in the 1990s. LaChiusa imbibed her stories about growing up in Peronist Buenos Aires without a father but with a loving mother, aunt, and grandmother. LaChiusa is at his best as a composer; by far the best aspect is the show’s score, which as played by a small orchestra isn’t particularly memorable but is pleasing enough, built on a foundation of woodwinds.
As for the story and the lyrics, they seem more like warm tributes to a friend that should have been presented privately rather than wheeled out for public consumption at Lincoln Center. It seems almost impossible that Daniele could be as uninteresting in real life as she is in this well-meaning but pillowy-soft show, which presents her analogue Anuncia as both a wide-eyed teen girl (Kalyn West) who takes up ballet because her mother thinks it will correct her flat feet and as a proud grande dame (Priscilla Lopez) sorting through her memories decades later as she prepares to accept a lifetime-achievement award at the very end of a long career. The garden where she tends her vegetables is, perhaps, LaChiusa’s idea of an interesting metaphor for how she has nurtured and cultivated others. Or possibly it indicates the way she cultivates the stories of her life. “Funny how memories pop up randomly,” notes Older Anuncia. Creatively speaking, this is fairly stony ground.
The Gardens of Anuncia, which takes place on a stage so sparsely furnished that a deathbed scene actually occurs on a deathbench, is a series of vignettes presenting the people close to Anuncia, broken up by occasional glancing references to the evils of Peronism (at least this is morally correct) and clichés about the alleged miseries of being female. “We live in the fatherland, not the motherland,” someone points out. I’m not sure who said it; the three older women are all uniformly wise, spunky, tough, and loving, while Younger Anuncia is so innocent, yearning, passive, and dull that West more or less maintains the same vapid expression throughout, not that the script ever hints that she should be doing anything else. Anuncia’s Granmama (Mary Testa) complains about the shortcomings of her estranged husband, a sailor (Enrique Acevedo) who’d “come home with stupid stories of the sea . . . I hated how he smelled and how he chewed his food.” He seems like a reasonably likable fellow, though, calling into question whether Granmama is more of a bitter old scold than an entertainingly uninhibited proto-feminist. Mami (Eden Espinosa) is tight-lipped about Anuncia’s father, a cad and a gambler whom we hear about only at the end of the show. At one point Mami was imprisoned for three months on suspicion of working for the anti-Peronists, though this political angle leads nowhere and we don’t even learn whether her antagonists were correct in believing she was part of a subversive plot. Anuncia’s kindly Tía (Andréa Burns), meanwhile, is on hand to give less than scintillating life advice such as “Listen to the Music” (“listen to the music, try to see the colors . . . listen to the music, listen to your feelings”).
To pad out a low-energy and aimless show—which was directed and co-choreographed by its subject, Daniele herself—Older Anuncia recalls whimsical conversations with a free-spirited deer and, after the deer gets killed for wandering onto a highway, with the deer’s cynical and dejected brother (both played by Tally Sessions, who has the finest voice in the cast). The cheery deer sings, “Dance while you can,” while the morose one, before delivering a less joyous reprise, wonders what the point of living is. To avoid mediocre shows, perhaps? At least this one, running only ninety minutes, is brief.
