Since it's part of the season at the Ahmanson Theater downtown and I'm a subscriber, Carolyn and I went last evening to see Spamalot. It was my third time, her second….and we took along our friends Earl and Denise, who'd never seen it before. We all enjoyed it very much. Not that this means a lot but I enjoyed it a bit less than the production I saw with the National Touring Company in Columbus, Ohio and a lot more than the one I saw in Las Vegas. Carolyn liked this one better than Columbus.
The difference for me was partly in the audience and partly in the cast. The audience in Columbus seemed more like it was full of die-hard Python fans who knew little or nothing about the show in advance and therefore had many delightfully-unexpected moments. The audience at the Ahmanson seemed a tad less Python-savvy and I got the feeling that a lot of them had either experienced the show before or had seen and heard enough about it that they knew what was coming. That's always a problem with a show that depends a lot on surprise and has been around for a while.
Some members of all three casts were good but I thought overall, the folks in the National Touring Company were a bit stronger. John O'Hurley is playing Arthur here and he's quite good…and even slips in a reference to J. Peterman. The fellow playing Patsy, Jeff Dumas, is also extremely talented.
The show's here through September 6 and if you're local and haven't seen it, try to go. I don't know how much longer it will be possible to see a full-scale production with all the sets and costumes. Any month now, we'll start getting the local and community college stagings that will of necessity be produced on a thousandth the budget. I suspect some of them will be very funny and very creative because the material will lend itself to ingenious interpretations. But you oughta see it once in all its fully-mounted glory.