27

DIVA LAS VEGAS

It’s eight o’clock in the morning and already stinking hot in Las Vegas. Not just hot, it’s blindingly bright. There is simply too much sunshine bouncing off the golden walls of the Wynn, blown by the strong wind shuffling across the desert, which lifts the awnings on the striped pavilions and ruffles the tassels and snaps the umbrellas. This is the only time you can be alone in Vegas. One or two early risers sit in the white ranks of loungers by the pool. The waiters chatter over the endless heartbeat thump of the disco, the gardeners spray water on the Provençal shrubbery, even the crickets are chirruping, though I am suspicious and see they have been piped in. There are tiny little speakers everywhere. Yes, the devil is in the details. There is half a forest of huge pines impressively green on the hillside, hauled in and tastefully replanted amongst the artificial grass, fake rocks, and carefully constructed waterfalls. I think I prefer the fake to the real. Hardly surprising: I am in show business, which is all about faking the real. The beauty of ancient places is accidental; the ugliness of Vegas is planned. Yet to stand in front of the phony Doge’s Palace at eleven and hear the chimes of Big Ben from London, the pealing of the bells from Paris, and the explosion of a volcanic waterfall is to experience something unintended. A random Universe created by a thousand monkeys. It makes you ask, “Why am I here?” The answer is Spamalot.

Spamalot was the first time in my life I experienced big money, and I liked it. That wonderful summer of having a hit on Broadway, Bill Haber, our producer, invited me and Tania to stay at his chateau in the Loire Valley. He showed me to our suite. There on the mantelpiece was a check for five hundred thousand dollars. To an English guy brought up poor, that was incredible. Next year he invited us again. I took our bags up and came back downstairs.

“Bill,” I said, “there’s no check…”

Thanks to Steve Wynn booking the show into Las Vegas, we had made our money back in record time. Only 18 percent of Broadway shows ever do that. What F. Scott Fitzgerald said of American lives is definitely true of Vegas: there are no second acts. Partly this is because they want you back in the casino, but mainly it’s because they want you back in the casino. In fact, with our low ticket prices ($49, $69, $89), I figured out that you will actually save money if you go and spend ninety minutes in Spamalot. Even on the cheapest slots. And if you sleep during the show, you can save on a room.

I’m a little concerned about how our show will play out here in the desert, so as part of my research I visited all the major attractions. Nothing quite matched the intensity of Jubilee!, which gripped me with its thrilling story of 150 bare-breasted ladies seducing Samson and causing the Titanic to sink. Sometimes the plot was hard to follow. As the huge ship went down on stage firing off rockets of distress, I knew just how it felt. To me the most interesting part of the evening was watching a show where the girls start nude and gradually put on more clothing. An oddly effective technique. One thing for sure, you cannot out-Vegas Vegas. There is simply no parodying this. There is no over-the-top. Only over-the-topless.

At the world-famous Crazy Horse, all the girls have short blond wigs, perfect derrieres, and genuine French names like Fifi and Suki. They remind me of what the Seventies was all about: light shows and shagging. But this show too is a little thin on plot. And clothing. The rest of the entertainment is all French Canadian, from Céline to the many Cirques. Monty Python was a Flying Circus but does that qualify us as a Cirque? We have no acrobats, no contortionists, and only a few French people farting in our general direction. How will the nipple-hungry Nevadans take our show?

At the press launch I say, “I’m missing my wife so much here in Vegas that last night I paid for a woman to come up to my room and ignore me.”

Steve Wynn says he has been trying to finish Broadway in Las Vegas and what better way than to put on Spamalot? He had recently put his elbow through his own Picasso in front of a small crowd of stunned guests. As a gag, I tried to persuade him now to put his elbow through a fake painting.

“It’ll kill,” I said.

“No way,” said Steve. “Bad enough I’m known as the Inspector Clouseau of the art world.”

Instead John O’Hurley, from Seinfeld, who is here to play golf and King Arthur, in that order, comes onstage. Together we do a tango. Why? Because neither of us could do the paso doble. And of course, we brought on our beautiful showgirls, wearing only white lingerie. Why? Do you need to ask? I announce that, as an added attraction, some of our shows will be topless, but only in John O’Hurley’s part.

Next day we are in a rehearsal room in the less salubrious side of Las Vegas, amongst the bail bonds and the pawnshops—the last place you see before the desert. Our modern studios are pleasant, and the cast is confident as they read my edited version for Mike Nichols and Casey Nicholaw. It’s not bad, but we caucus thoughtfully in a conference room. On Broadway the play was fifty minutes, then a nice intermission, and then sixty minutes of Act Two. Now it is ninety minutes straight through, and that’s a completely different dramatic shape. There is work to be done. It’s not that we are long, but with a ninety-minute shape you have to feel the driving force of the plot. It must never feel like a sketch show. We roll up our sleeves and set to work. I have a wonderful feeling of nostalgia. It’s like two years ago when we were on Forty-Second Street. Ah, happy days.

Mike gives a master class. He talks to the actors for about fifty minutes, but in that talk he says everything they will ever need to know about drama. He is spectacular. Not just about truth telling in acting, or storytelling, or about the shape and types of scene, but how to ask: What is this like? Who am I being like? What does this remind me of? He ends by reminding them not to be funny. Just say the words. Don’t act. Meanwhile, I am cutting and pruning and trimming and there are glum faces as I remove favorite bits.

Then I bring in my secret weapon: Terry Gilliam. I confess to the cast that what I had told them about all the other Pythons being dead is not true. They are thrilled to meet the legendary Gilliam, who has brought down more financial institutions than Enron. Even he is bowled over by the Grail Theater and the new Python Hall that leads up to it. Large cutout iconic figures of Silly Walks and Colonels and Naughty Vicars decorate the entrance, and there is a plethora of Gilliam art. Terry says he is going home to persuade Michael Palin to come for the opening. Ironically, Michael has announced he is staying home because he’s writing a travel book. John Cleese is scheduled to attend but then he plays God, and we know they both move in mysterious ways. Sadly, Terry Jones can’t make it. He is apparently wrestling with chemo. I rather hoped he would be here wrestling with keno.

Will Spamalot succeed? Who knows? Dare I say, it’s a crapshoot. We have, by Vegas standards, a huge advance, but the word of mouth will be everything. If we make ’em laugh, we’ll have a shot. If not, well, we have the North American tour, we have Broadway, we have London and soon Australia, and I shall just have to get used to not having dinner with billionaires again.

The first preview went great. In fact, it took ages to clear the theater afterwards as they were lining up to buy merchandise—Killer Rabbits, Coconuts, and Flying Cows. Even the Wynn-folk were impressed.

On the third night of previews we had a major glitch. Our elevator failed and, instead of the Lady of the Lake and her Laker Girls emerging from a pond in their skimpy fronds, nothing happened. King Arthur stood gesturing to an empty stage.

“She’s a bit late,” said John O’Hurley, exiting. “I’d better see where she is.”

Galahad and Patsy and Mrs. Bedevere looked alarmed.

“Me too,” they said and they all went off, leaving an empty stage. Great. Nice improv, people.

From below we could hear the Lady of the Lake singing away with all the chorus girls, but no one emerged. Backstage, they had forgotten to build stairs from the basement to the stage level, and now the onstage lift was jammed. The stage was empty, the audience was growing restless, and nobody came on to explain anything. Oh dear. We were going to have to stop. Some deep show-off instinct kicked in and I found myself rushing down through the audience and up onto the stage. The place went wild. The easiest standing ovation I ever had.

“This is what technically in theatrical terms we call a fuckup,” I said. “A huge helicopter was supposed to land…Oh, no, that was another show.”

I ad-libbed for about ten minutes, thinking how Eddie Izzard would be proud of me doing improvisational stand-up in front of 1,600 people. Luckily the glitch ended before I did and I escaped back into the audience and the show continued. Opening on my sixty-fourth birthday, March 29, 2007, Spamalot would run in Las Vegas at the Wynn for sixteen months, and when we closed, I said we were some of the few people ever to leave the city with money in our pockets.