I really liked the show Spamalot. I've seen it four times — once in Columbus, Ohio with the national touring company…once in Las Vegas…once at the Ahmanson in downtown Los Angeles…and once down in Redondo Beach in a production that used (I think) the sets and costumes of the national touring company. The one I enjoyed the most was the one in Columbus because it was expertly presented, everything was new to me…and I was in it.
And I've listened many, many times to the Broadway Cast Album. I'm not sure why I never listened to the 2010 album done by the company that went on tour with a revival of the show in the United Kingdom. Guess I never noticed it…but I did recently. You can buy it on Amazon but it's very expensive. I listened to it on Spotify and discovered that (a) it's very good and (b) a lot of it's different.
There are quite a few lyric changes, most notably in "Whatever Happened to My Part?" And what may be my favorite song in the show — "You Won't Succeed on Broadway" — is completely rewritten to omit all mention of Jews. It's now called "The Star Song" and instead of trying to have a hit show on Broadway, it's about trying to have one in Bromley, which is a large town in South London. Here's a before-and-after of one small hunk of each…
BROADWAY VERSION:
In any great adventure, if you don't want to lose,
Victory depends upon the people that you choose.
So listen, Arthur darling, closely to this news,
We won't succeed on Broadway if we don't have any Jews.BRITISH VERSION:
In any show biz venture, from Shakespeare down to Keats,
If you want to be successful, you must put bums in seats.
So listen, Arthur darling, or you won't get very far,
You won't succeed in Bromley if you haven't got a star.
And then all the stuff about goys and shiksas and the little snatch of "Hava Nagila" and the Fiddler on the Roof reference is gone. The quest from that point on is not to find Jews to be in the show but to land a major star. Some of the dialogue that surrounds the songs on the U.K. cast recording suggests other changes in the book.
This is not a complaint. I'm just sharing something I just found out and find interesting. Based on a bit of Internet Research, it would seem that the original London company on the West End used the Broadway script when it debuted in 2006. Then in 2010 when a tour began, it was decided to change the song to make it more local and about the theater business in Great Britain and its stars. Also, British theater has nowhere near as much Jewish blood in its DNA. And apparently, it's only "Bromley" in this CD because it was recorded when the tour was playing in Bromley. In other cities, there were other place names there.
You can probably hear the song a dozen places online if you search for "star song spamalot" without the quotes. And if you're as much a fan of this show as I am, you might want to listen to the whole album which you can do on Spotify, Amazon and probably other places. It's a pretty good presentation of the songs.