Carol Rosegg

‘You don’t have to ham it up, it’s kind of hammed for you,’ says Spamalot’s Garry Beach

DETAILS

Spamalot by Broadway in Calgary
Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
Tuesday, August 5 - Sunday, August 10

More in: Theatre

Find It...

Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Creating a successful comic musical is at least part alchemy. The constituent parts, book and music, may be the same, but the combinations are really anyone’s guess. All anyone can be reasonably sure of is that, when it comes to the main ingredient, you should at least try film: from Spider-Man: Web Singer to, why not, more Mel Brooks.

Monty Python’s Spamalot, making a six-day stop in Calgary on its North American tour, is definitely poured from the same crucible that’s created almost every big-budget Broadway musical in recent memory. Based on 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show mixes a proven commodity (a classic cult comedy) with new music (courtesy of former Python Eric Idle and collaborator John Du Perez) to create a bona fide international hit. It even adds a smattering of other new touches, like The Lady of the Lake (Esther Stilwell) and improvised local commentary, for old devotees.

Garry Beach, who plays King Arthur, has already given 200 performances in the touring production, his first in 26 years. And with 30 years of experience in musical comedy, he maintains a Zen-like approach to the movie-turned-musical formula, quipping, “That seems to be Broadway.”

“I think Broadway has always taken from other mediums,” he says. “Oklahoma! was taken on a play [Green Grow the Lilacs] that someone had written years before that hadn’t been terribly successful, and South Pacific was based on a short story by James A. Michener.”

Beach himself is a familiar face in one of the most recognizable films-turned-musicals (and then, in this case, back into a film) of the last decade: Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Playing the flamboyant and atrocious director Roger DeBris, in both the stage play and film, Beach was a part of what has become a byword for phenomenal if somewhat unexpected Broadway success. It’s a phenomenon he’s careful to point out is a fickle mixture, influenced as much by luck as any formula. “Who knew that it would become what it became,” he asks. “It went from being a beloved cult film to being this worldwide smash hit musical, and yet one has little to do with the other and yet everything to do with it.”

Like Spamalot, which has enjoyed runs in London, New York and around the world, The Producers offers the familiar ring of a proven comedy. “You don’t have to ham it up, it’s kind of hammed for you,” says Beach.

And while an already successful commodity by no means assures a profitable run (see: The Lord of the Rings), Idle’s “lovingly ripped off” Monty Python-branded creation has grown to a size that demands alchemical success — enough to pay off investors, producers and, of course, cast and crew. “It’s like travelling with a very small village,” says Beach of the 80-some on and offstage staff. “We alight on a town and put up a show, and before you know it pull down the tents and off we go.”

The big musical with an established fan base also has the advantage of offering an alternative to the kind of media best enjoyed from the couch. After all, while those of us who can recite Python lines verbatim might have enjoyed the company of fellow fanatics, we’ve rarely done the same with an audience of thousands. That’s alchemy of an entirely different kind. “It’s great to see an audience walk in as strangers and walk out as a community, having laughed at the same things,” says Beach. “You look at fellow audience members and it’s almost a nod, ‘Wasn’t that great?’ You don’t get that watching television.”