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Swann1719
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Posted: Thu Jan 10th, 2008 02:44 pm |
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At the behest of someone in my theatre crowd last night I went to see Spamalot. It is a cobbled together non-story of Monty Python highlights. It plays more like a sketch show than a coherent story, which is fine. It was somewhat enjoyable.
In November (on Thanksgiving actually) I went to see Floating - a show by Hoi Polloi theatre company in Cambridge that won a Fringe First in 2006. Floating is a magical realist story of Hugh Hughes coming of age on the Isle of Anglesey (off the coast of North Wales), who cannot leave the island and start his life when Anglesey breaks off and drifts at sea.
Floating and Spamalot - the North Pole and South Pole of the world of comedy.
I went to see Meet Me In Saint Louis on Broadway one Christmas when I was ten. And I remember thinking even at ten that the story was lame. But - they actually had a frozen pond on stage and they were ice skating. It is fun to be dazzled on occasion, the razzle dazzle can even compensate for the lack of integrity in the story. But I feel slightly dirty afterward. It's fun in the same way that buying Grazia or OK! or People is fun - you look at images and forget your life but then you regret wasting time and neural networks on things like the name of Tom Cruise's first wife.
Spamalot is similar brain candy - it spares no expense to give you dazzling images. But the story?
Maybe when Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce and Hank Azaria were in the cast, they could imbue this thing with some charm and personality (there has to be a reason it won the Tony for best musical last year) but the King Arthur character - a guy named Peter Davison (who probably posts on this site and will be mad at me - hey, it's happened before) couldn't have been worse. He was phoning it in from on stage. The female lead, a part so badly cobbled together that she sings a song "Whatever Happened To My Part" in Act II, was played by Hannah Waddingham. Hannah can really sing. Dazzling. And a few times I really laughed - and that is always good. The glitz and costumes were unbelievable, the dancing girls were whippet thin and very leggy. The best sketches of the film The Grail did not, in my opinion, survive the transition to stage well. They might have done in their original paired-down style, but the big budget glitz got into the actors' brains and they all "enhanced" the originals (Nights Who Say Ni, French Soldier, Flesh Wound), mostly by repeating punch lines. Spamalot is Monty Python painted with a coat of Disney. Real Python fans approach with caution: I heard the furious murmurings of purists during intermission.
The budget for Floating was probably the budget for one of the dancer's outfits in Spamalot. In Edinburgh in 2007 I saw Story of Rabbit - another Hugh Hughes creation and I was absolutely enchanted. The character of Hugh Hughes (played by Shon Dale Jones) is like Charlie Chaplin's silent man or Groucho Marx - utterly original and unexpectedly charming. The tale of the unmoored island is told with one other actor, Sioned, projections, running around the theatre, making observations about the nature of theatre, thumping on walls, distributing old magazines and rattling tea cups - all in a Welsh accent.
I don't think I have ever seen an audience enjoy itself more than at Floating. They were going nuts. I mean, they weren't screaming. It wasn't Barack Obama but there was an undeniable magic, an air of conviviality and community that was part Quaker meeting and part school assembly before holidays. I took my 70-year-old mother-in-law and a record company executive to see it and they both loved it, as did the heavily pierced teenagers in the throng (who were, magically, happy to chat to me and even more magically I was not annoyed by them). I'll venture a guess as to why Floating got this reaction - it is funny. OK, that's not the only reason. It is loving. It sounds dorky but the way the story is told and the development of the characters all is done with such love that it makes you feel good just being in the room. When I left I felt like I should have paid more for my ticket.
There's gotta be some trick. Maybe it's the character of Hugh Hughes: Dale Jones has come up with a character who can address the audience without irony, without a knowing wink. He can be baffled when the props don't work and his efforts to connect to the audience are heart rending in their authenticity. He - Hughes - is trying so hard to make this presentation that is not quite theatre but actually Dale Jones being Hughes is pure theatre but it doesn't matter because Dale Jones - also primary writer - really was trying, as the writer, by the unsophisticated sweat of his brow to fashion Hugh Hughes in order to tell the story. It's confusing.
Maybe the universal nature of the story : the perilous nature of change and the love and hate of the known.
Hugh Hughes has a veneer of simplicity, but Dale Jones is wickedly observant and utterly committed to connecting to each person in the audience. Floating dances back and forth across lines - on the stage, on the map, the one between reality and fantasy. At the end of the show, Hugh and Sioned come out to the foyer and distribute little "Get Connected" buttons. I watched in shock as my husband - a telecommunications lawyer and mountain climber not prone to self-adornment with badge - happily clipped it to his lapel. And then he talked about the show to me weeks later. What the heck? What makes it so good? Were we drugged at the theatre?
Spamalot was OK, but Floating was good - really good - morally, relationally, artistically and I for one am hornswoggled. Floating is gone for now but Story of Rabbit, the other Hugh Hughes show, is touring in the spring. Go see it and tell me what it is.
Last edited on Thu Jan 10th, 2008 03:39 pm by Swann1719
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