The Rake Magazine

What do you get when you take the cult classic Monty Python and The Holy Grail, add a bit of the British comedy troupe's other great movies and music, toss in a pinch of Broadway cliché and a dash of pop culture, and throw it all into a blender?

SPAMALOT!

With such an incredible following, it would be unthinkable for Monty Python to just take the plot of The Holy Grail, add a few musical numbers, and let 'er rip on Broadway. Instead, the Pythons took the opportunity to build on their comedic legacy by parodying not only themselves, but every Broadway and pop culture reference they could get their hands on. Amazingly enough ... it worked!

The broad outline of The Holy Grail remains intact. King Arthur still assembles his cast of knights to seek the holy grail, and encounters weird and wild obstacles along the way. But some elements of the film's plot were moved around a bit, and songs from other Monty Python productions were added and revised to fit the plot.

Spamalot's outlandish satirization of Broadway's most glaring clichés helps form a diverted plot twist in the second act, in which Arthur realizes that the only way he'll find the Holy Grail is by putting on a Broadway play. Don't worry; this is far from a spoiler, as the pursuit of the Broadway play becomes it's own hilarious journey.

Never taking their stint on Broadway too seriously, Monty Python takes on the self-mocking task of weaving together Broadway and pop culture spoofs with references to The Producers, Phantom of the Opera, Cats, West Side Story, and The Wizard of Oz, just to name a few. All this while moving along the adapted storyline of Monty Python and and the Holy Grail.

Andrew Lloyd Webber takes the brunt of the Broadway chastisement, however, even getting referenced by name by the knights who say "Ni," when they make the stipulation that the Broadway show that Arthur produces cannot be an Andrew Lloyd Webber play. When his name is uttered it elicits a screech even louder than that when the word "Ni" is used.

Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera also gets parodied when the Lady of the Lake does a duet with Sir Galahad, singing "The Song That Goes Like This" a la "Music of the Night" or "All I Ask of You" or "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" from Phantom. The song's title refers to the Broadway cliché that there is always a climactic song (or two or three) in musicals when the male and female leads come together at last and sing a long, overly dramatic song to each other.

Rife with sarcasm, the song's opening lyrics reads, "Once in every show, there comes a song like this. It starts off soft and low, and ends up with a kiss."

Not only does Arthur's path change in the play, but so does that of Brave, Brave Sir Robin, who learns that he wants to work in musical theater, and the outed Sir Lancelot who finds that his "Holy Grail" is to "Find your male."

Patrick Heusinger, who returns to Minnesota, where he played young Lars in the 2005 film Sweetland, puts in the best performance of the evening as Sir Lancelot ... and The French Taunter ... and Knight of Ni ... and Tim The Enchanter. That's right; he plays four parts, each as bold and audacious as the last. His performance is the most reminiscent of the original cast of The Holy Grail.

The Lady of the Lake character is a welcome addition to the plot, only appearing as a reference in the Holy Grail film. Played by Esther Stilwell, the stereotypical diva has her mind set on marrying King Arthur from the beginning. Not only is her character a diva, but the songs that she sings are reminiscent of pop divas Mariah Carey, Cristina Aguilera, and Celine Dion ... on steroids. Stilwell's deliberately pitchy singing and overly dramatic performances poke fun at the Diva culture.

If there is something missing from the film version, it is the characteristicly high male voices that the Monty Python crew brought to The Holy Grail. There are one or two scattered about in Spamalot, but nothing like the Monty Python movies.

Fans of The Holy Grail should fear not, though. Such classic Grail scenes as Bring out your dead, the killer rabbit, the Black Knight, the french taunters, and the knights that say "Ni" still play a role in Spamalot. Some of them have gotten even funnier and have been expanded to include outlandishly choreographed musical numbers to further the stage plot.

The musical expansion of Grail's plot is best exemplified by the transformation of the vignette song "Knights of the Round Table" from the movie, into a lavish Vegas-meets-Broadway-meets-Camelot number that features showgirls twirling maces, a monk swing dancing with a nun, a Cher/Liza Minelli/Amy Winehouse lounge singer, and King Arthur's round "roulette" table.

So, grab yourself a little Vegas, add a splash of Camelot, mix-in a little Oz, and drink down some Spamalot. And remember, what happens in Spamelot ... stays in Spamelot.

Tickets are still available for Spamalot at the Orpheum Theater through June 1.

How utterly devastating it must be to go through life as "unfortunate looking." I could live with plain, ordinary, even homely — but unfortunate? This is no way to live. It's shear impetus to go under the knife: just get surgery and look like everyone else.

Certainly, many people bank on their good looks to get them through life; but there are indeed others who actually have to earn respect through hard work. Which would you prefer? The first is easier, no doubt. I'm guessing most of us would love to avoid the latter of the two if we could.

The Ugly One, now showing at the Guthrie's Dowling Studio, uses an "exploratory" (apparently, the director, Benjamin McGovern, doesn't like to describe theater as experimental, so in an effort to avoid offending him, I'll use the word exploratory) avant-garde style, typical of black box theater. Simple scene designs and costumes, and exploratory direction, drive through a message about the importance of succeeding by hard work, regardless of physical shortcomings.

The Ugly One follows the story of, as you may expect, a very ugly man named Lette (played by Kris L. Nelson). While Lette is initially (the only one) unaware of his unfortunate stature, his shallow, smug boss (played by Luverne Seifert) finally sets him straight by cruelly informing him that he is in fact very ugly. It is at this point that Lette decides to reconstruct his face. After a successful surgery, people are enthralled by his good looks, and he is quickly promoted to head of sales. As his ego seeks long-awaited gratification, however, Lette is overcome by the astonishing amount of women who want to sleep with him. Yes, he's just as human as the next frog-turned-prince; and with so many choices as hand, he cheats on his beautiful wife, who, captivated by her husband's new face, refuses to leave him.

News travels fast of the seemingly impossible (and ludicrously lucrative) surgery, and envious, greedy hoards swarm to the surgeon to recreate his masterpiece upon their faces. Before long, Lette's face is everywhere — even among his coworkers. (Can you imagine seeing your face in every cubicle down the hall?) The novelty long gone, the original incumbent prince reevaluates his decision.

The 55-minute play has only four actors, each playing multiple characters. The only woman in the play, actress Kate Eifrig, smoothly transitions from Lette's wife to an old woman with enough plastic surgery to make Dolly Parton jealous. It's safe to say her characters are the easiest to distinguish, as she utilizes her whole body to interpret them. This is no surprise considering all the roles she played in her last Guthrie performance, 9 Parts of Desire — a stellar one-woman production.

Kris L. Nelson's did a great job flipping from an ugly man with a beautiful heart to an attractive man with an ugly heart, realizing that he lost himself in the midst of his transformation.

What's particularly interesting about this production, however, is the way it plays off of the audience's imagination. Rather than simply presenting beauty and ugliness for us to react to, most of what we know is not seen, but derived from reactions and dialog. The audience reacts to the reactions, rather than to the physical aspects themselves. This brings out an interesting irony in the play, since the theme revolves around identity in terms of physical beauty. Does the play strengthen its point by refusing to present beauty in physical form? Or is it simply cowardice — avoiding any statement or distraction of what is beautiful or ugly?

A farcical comedy with wit and intrigue, The Ugly One is an enjoyable exploratory play that will leave you with an understanding that maybe you ought to take another look in the mirror.

7:30 p.m., May 28-June 1^st, Guthrie Theatre, 818 South 2nd St., Minneapolis; $18-$34.

There are two things that need to be done, I think, when adapting a Shakespeare play. First, respects must be paid to the language — the actors must own their lines, the director must choose the emphases that suit his/her interpretation best. And second, the cast must act as translators, using their bodies to re-interpret the script and make it relatable for the modern audience, so that thumb-biting, say, can actually be perceived as an offense. For the most part, Four Humors Theater's staging of Romeo and Juliet, showing this weekend and next at the Bedlam Theater, accomplishes these tasks.

It's a minimal production. Romeo (Jason Bohon) wears jeans and a hoodie; Juliet (Elise Langer) is in a jersey dress. (Both sport ergonomically designed Puma sneakers.) Aside from a tire swing and a couple moveable screen doors, the set is mostly bare, which is nice — there's no gimmickry.

Director Jason Ballweber has taken obvious pains to make this an intimate performance. When Romeo wanders into the crowd and begins to direct his speech to audience members, there's a genuine feel to it; it seems he's actually speaking to the theatergoers, not just reciting his lines in one's personal space. Throughout, Bohon sustains his role well. He plays a thoughtful Romeo, humanizing the character's rather absurd (rather pubescent) passions and moods — he's gloomy, sure, but never becomes melodramatically morose.

Likewise, Langer adds a good bit of levity to Juliet's character. She delivers her speeches like a fourteen-year-old girl talking to her friend on the phone — a sort of rapid-fire, valley-esque style that makes one believe she has butterflies fluttering in her head. At first it's a bit hard to get used to — she's rushing through the lines and it's difficult to catch the meaning of the bard's words — but after a scene or two, when the audience is able to settle in, it's actually delightful. Impressive, even.

Finally, Kimberly Richardson turns out a fantastic performance as Juliet's nurse. Ballweber has invested a particular amount of weight in this role, turning the nurse into one of Shakespeare's ‘fool' characters, as from Twelfth Night or Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dressed something like Mrs. Doubtfire, she's the wise old lady with her fingers in everyone's business, her ward's interests closest to her heart. Maybe the most effective scene of the play is late in the second act when Juliet and her nurse meet in the Capulets' orchard. The nurse has just come from the friar's with news of Juliet's wedding, and Juliet has to wring it out from her. The nurse paces up and down the bowling-lane-like stage, feigning woe, avoiding Juliet's questions, causing her to go into something like hysteria. And then, just as the audience is beginning to wonder how serious she is, Richardson flashes a quick smile to the crowd, letting us in on her joke, before she goes on tormenting the young lover.

It's a good, light approach to the play — typical of the Four Humors style that has won them so much praise in the last few years. When the minstrels begin to sing a medieval rendition of "Gin and Juice," one is reminded of the 4HT production of Bards, wherein the chorus de-modified the Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M."

At times, though — especially in the first few acts — the staging sacrifices feeling for humor. The balcony scene is where we first get a real look at Juliet's flighty character, and here she seems a bit too concerned with making sure the audience knows how cute she is than with her connection to Romeo. Also, though a Shakespeare play isn't a Shakespeare play without a little cross-dressing, casting choices make the exchanges between Mercutio and Benvolio often seem ripped from an episode of Will and Grace.

That said, the airy first half makes the darkness of the second half that much more clear. When the tragedy begins to unfold, we haven't been so bogged down by melancholy that we can't stomach anymore. Rather, we're ready for the sadness when it comes, and as tragicomedies go, it is all the more poignant.

In the 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, an American Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, falls in love with a rambunctious Englishman who is — as she is — having an affair with her bisexual boss. Whereas in the 1966 stage play Cabaret, it was Sally who was English, her boyfriend who was American, and there was a wholesome subtextual storyline about their elderly landlady's romance with a Jewish fruit merchant.

In the Ordway's current production of Cabaret, there's a little bit of each mixed in.

Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of '66, with an English Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. And when Sally turns up pregnant with a baby she claims could be anyone's, he immediately volunteers — no qualms about her decided female-ness — to make her his wife.

In between there are dance numbers introduced by the "emcee" (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with an impossible loud and grating voice. He's impossible to love at first, as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign's "C," but by intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad.

There is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw's patron and friend. Ludwig is a tall, ebony-haired Aryan who somehow riles the entire club into raising their arms to the Third Reich. The fall-out comes first when gentle Herr Schultz, the fruit seller, has a brick hurled through his window. And then when Bradshaw, the stalwart American, gets beaten because he refuses to put up with all that Gestapo guff.

I wish I could say that I loved this play. I do love the Ordway; I think it's as stately a theater as the Twin Cities has. The set was amazing: morphing from nightclub to modest rooming house with the twitch of a few items, by evening's end lit with colored bulbs that gave it a festive, garish air.

There were some truly outstanding performances — the best by far by Ms. Hunt who infused her Fraulein Schneider with imperious yet tentatively regal carriage. Her voice was pure starch and honey. I could have listened to her all night. Unfortunately, though, most of the songs were sung by Tari Kelly who played Sally Bowles. And while she was a dead ringer for Minnelli (at least from Row S) her theory seemed to be that sheer volume would make up for feeling or finesse.

The dancers were lovely and scantily-clad in a pleasing, authentically bawdy 1930's Berliner sort of way; God knows, I like hot pants and fishnets and sequined bras as much as the next red-blooded American girl. There's even a very charming moment during Money Makes the World Go Round when Monopoly money drifted from the rafters and into the audience, twirling in the twinkling lights.

But in the end, as the curtain came down, I felt as if all the brilliant parts of the Ordway's Cabaret had not quite added up to something as whole and extraordinary as I would have liked. True, they missed the mark by a very small margin — and this may be fixed by Tuesday, the official opening night — but as it is there are uneven edges. The first act was too long; the second felt incredibly rushed.

More important, the story was not consistent. I wanted either a playboy love interest or a wide-eyed gee golly one, not a weird mish-mash of the two. And without that, the production fell just short of what it should.

Not that you would have known to see the audience at the end. I know. . . .I've been beating this drum for years. But NOTHING to my mind marks Minnesotans as more universally ignorant than the standing ovation, which is obligatory at every single concert, opera, comedy routine, and play. I am sick and tired of going to shows that are good but not great and watching everyone around me jump out of their seats like so many obsequious, brainless cows.

Yes, I feel strongly about this. But to my mind, it's like over praising a child for efforts that fall short. How is a toddler to learn if you keep showering kisses down because he or she piddled almost in the potty? By doing this, you simply reinforce the puddle on the floor.

And so it is with the stage, where standing ovations for performances that are almost but not quite extraordinary, like Cabaret, lower the bar. Which given the talent and resources and venues we have here in town is a goddamn shame.

Although it was one of the last plays he wrote, Gem of the Ocean falls first chronologically in August Wilson's 10 plays about the black experience in 20th century America. It's not his best — Fences and The Piano Lesson both won Pulitzers — but Penumbra Theatre puts on a solid interpretation at the Guthrie.

Wilson typically keeps the action contained in one location: the setting for Gem of the Ocean is the parlor of a 285-year-old "soul cleanser," Aunt Ester (Marvette Knight), in 1904 Pittsburgh. Aunt Ester imparts the wisdom of a woman who has experienced almost 250 years of slavery and survived the Civil War. At the play's climax, Ester's parlor is transformed — through blue lighting, stark shadows, and befitting sound — into a slave ship, the Gem of the Ocean. She leads a young man, Citizen Barlow (Cedric Mays), through a mystical experience to the City of Bones, where he confronts slavery, the man who died for his own crime, and, ultimately, freedom. The scene reflects the play's theme as articulated by Ester: "What use do we make of our freedom?"

Unfortunately, the journey to the City of Bones has nearly as much gimmick as it does depth. Mays is convincing as he is shackled supernaturally to the slave deck of the Gem of the Ocean and as he faces the consequences of his past crime. But the device of this magical voyage accomplishes little that could not have been achieved in "reality."

Wilson is a master at using more realistic, and more convincing, devices as the central conflict of a narrative. In The Piano Lesson, it's a piano, co-owned by a brother and sister, carved with the faces of two ancestors. The sister never wants to depart with the piano, and her brother, eager to buy land, wants to sell it — a conflict of preservation of history versus moving on. In the first scene of Fences, a character tries to conceal a watermelon, a device that Wilson uses to reverse the racist connotation of the watermelon-loving minstrel. The Gem of the Ocean does not approach this level of subtle but powerful symbolism.

Director Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theatre, is well positioned to bring Gem of the Ocean to the
stage. He won an Obie Award in 2007 for directing Wilson's Two Trains
Running in New York City, and he directed Penumbra's production of The Piano Lesson earlier this year. His comprehensive understanding of Wilson's work is apparent on the stage. The characters are eccentric without going over the top, and the conversations they have in Aunt Ester's parlor are truly engaging.

Black Mary (Austene Van), who lives with Aunt Ester, is a jilted woman who nevertheless remains compassionate. Eli (Abdul Salaam el Razzac), who also lives with Ester, is agitated with Citizen in the first scene, but he eventually employs him to build a wall. Eli remains calm and relaxed throughout the rest of the show, saying, "This is a peaceful home," when people stop by to visit. He has frequent, long conversations with Solly Two Kings (James Craven), a man who once helped with the Underground Railroad and now sells dog poop as fuel, about the black community's difficult adaptation from slavery to free society.

Black Mary's brother, Caeser (T. Mychael Rambo), is an Uncle Tom character who one can't help but be angry with (and even sympathize with him a bit) for his deplorable decisions as an enforcer of the law. The only remaining character, Rutherford Selig (Terry Hempleman), is a white salesperson who fills only a minor role in the plot.

Knight plays a lively almost-300-year-old, but because Ester is such a
mystical figure, and because Wilson reveals in King Hedley II that she
lives to be 366 — hence she has almost a century of life remaining in Gem of the Ocean — her youthful portrayal of an elderly woman is not distracting.

Citizen's transformation from a nervous young man in the first act to a
confident man who confronts his demons could have been more delicate, but this lies more in how the play is written than how the character was acted.

The play, about personal redemption, justice and the law, and the meaning of freedom, is not a must-see, but it is a strong production.

Performances will run through May 18 on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie. There will be post-play discussions following the May 3 & May 14 matinees.