Monty Python's Spamalot Rewiew and Tickets

I have begun preparations for a lengthy trip to New York City over the holidays and have picked about ten Broadway shows I hope to attend.  The one I am most excited about is Monty Python's Spamalot.   Currently, this is the toughest tickets on Broadway, so it is to eBay that I must turn.

Shubert Theatre
225 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036

David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry, Sara Ramirez (winner of the 2005 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical) and Hank Azaria star in Monty Python's Spamalot. Directed by Mike Nichols, the winner of the 2005 Tony for Best Direction of a Musical, the show features a book by Eric Idle, winner of the 2005 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics, based on the screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by Monty Python creators Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, with an entirely new score featuring music and lyrics by Eric Idle and John Du Prez, along with three songs from the 1975 film. Spamalot is produced by Ostar Boyett Productions.
Telling the legendary tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and their quest for the Holy Grail, Monty Python's Spamalot features a chorus line of dancing divas and knights, flatulent Frenchmen, killer rabbits and one legless knight who create unforgettable musical production numbers that Eric Idle promises will be "as good as or quite likely better than any other show with killer rabbits and a legless knight opening on Broadway or in Chicago this season."

Reviewed By: David Finkle - Theatermania.com

Having enjoyed Monty Python's Spamalot, I can say that I've seen the immediate future of musical comedy, and it's the past. This laff-a-minute show, which is really a series of sketches on a related theme, continues the trend that tuner purveyors have recently been following with determination: They're reinserting the word "comedy" in the phrase "musical comedy" and merrily regressing from there. (The movement is unmistakable and must be regarded as a backlash against the serious, often sung-through musicals of the past few decades.)

The folks who've crafted Spamalot as if piecing together a gaudy Tinkertoy haven't just reexamined what made musicals of the '40s and '50s entertain large audiences. They've scampered back to the '30s, when musicals were built around stage clowns like Bert Lahr and Ed Wynn, and even farther back to the '20s, when it was virtually a requirement that frivolous plots end with a wedding.

It's giving nothing away to say that Spamalot finishes with nuptials, since it's the getting to the knotty knot-tying that's the point. The show has six clowns at its dizzying vortex; Monty Python fans know that the iconoclastic original troupe was six-strong and that the property is, according to the title page, "a new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Skipping through the comically addled proceedings are top-billed (but not over-the-title) Tim Curry as a nonplused King Arthur, David Hyde Pierce as a timid knight, and Hank Azaria as a Lancelot with sexual-identity challenges. Billed below them but no less delighfully goofy are Christopher Sieber as a vain Galahad, Michael McGrath as Arthur's put-upon servant "Patsy," and Christian Borle as the effeminate son of a gruff laird. As an ensemble, most of them doubling with aplomb, they're as effective as the silly sextet that originally populated The Producers.