"An African swallow, sure . . . ."

So, we went to see Spamalot at the National Theater here in our Nation's capital. I am, of course, a huge fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as anyone who ever went to college is. So the musical version was a fun time. Indeed, a great part of the musical is simply live recreations of scenes from the film . . . with exact dialogue . . . which are then followed by musical numbers. Of all the MP films, this one is probably the least musical, or at least that would be my guess. So almost all the musical numbers are new. As are "the Laker girls," the Lady of the Lake's, um, solid gold dancers.

There are two strange things about the musical version that I'd like to note. First, many of the musical numbers are spoofs on Broadway musicals. So, not being a Broadway musicals kind of guy, I'm sure that many of those jokes went right past me. I mean, I got the jokes on Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, and Phantom, etc. But I'm sure I missed a lot of jokes. The Les Miz joke, during the French Taunting scene, was a little too obvious to miss, though.

Second, the musical tries to pull together the disparate threads of the film into a plot. Really. At the end, Arthur marries the Lady in the Lake, whose name, it turns out, is Guinevere. (I may not have spelled that correctly.) Galahad is actually Dennis, the "old woman" who lives on the autonomous anarcho-syndicalist commune. Brave Sir Robin is the "bring out your dead" guy. So, in effect, the musical takes the early scenes and turns them into a gathering of the samurai. This makes more narrative sense then the structure of the film, which, well, doesn't really have a structure.

Finally, the musical includes "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which is actually in Monty Python's Life of Brian. Anyone else agree that Life of Brian is the best MP film?