MY GREEDY BASTARD PUBLISHER, SENSING COMMERCIAL POSSIBILITIES, HAS SUGGESTED I PROVIDE SOME ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ABOUT MONTY Python’s Spamalot. I’m at the moment sitting in a wheelchair with a huge pink cast covering my leg up to my knee, my dancing days may be over and, sadly, England will have to turn to someone else for soccer this season. An MRI revealed that the irritating foot injury from my Tour was a snapped tendon, and so now I’ve had major foot surgery, a weekend in the Valley on morphine, several days of Vicodin which have left me as solid as Elvis (All Things Must Pass), and I have had to sit around for a couple of months awaiting the painful process of physiotherapy to begin. What a summer. No walks. No swimming. No trips to Europe. Just writing and rewriting Spamalot. So perhaps it is a good time to provide you with a fairly excursive, exclusive, incomplete and far from utter history of Spamalot. I am, of course, very aware that writing anything about Spamalot at this point is a hostage to fortune. (“Little did he know that it would close after only three minutes on Broadway… ”) None of us can foresee the future and even the Psychic Network is, I believe, unreliable, so these lines are written in a spirit of fatalistic optimism. I know we can screw up, believe me…
I fart in your general direction…
You’ve Got Grail!
It’s April 2004 in Shubert Alley and hard by Broadway I’m stopped by a rough and ready street person.
“Are you really doing an adaptation of The Holy Grail for the stage?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Will there be a Killer Rabbit?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m coming,” he said, and went off gleefully shouting, “Ni!”
Mike Nichols looked shocked. And impressed.
Another ticket sold.
Almost three years of my life so far on Spamalot and it still seems like a good idea to transform Monty Python and the Holy Grail into a musical. For several years I thought about it; after all, there are three songs in the movie and there are several points which seem almost to demand a song:
“I’m not dead yet!”
“Run away!”
“I fart in your general direction!”
Well, a Python song anyway. It’s practically a musical already.
So now with only a week to go before the start of rehearsals we have Mike Nichols to direct Tim Curry as King Arthur, David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot (and an hysterical French Taunter), Chris Sieber as a very funny Sir Galahad, Michael McGrath as Patsy, Christian Borle as a very funny Prince Herbert, Steve Rosen as Sir Bedevere and Galahad’s mum, and Sara Ramirez as a supersexy siren who pops up out of a lake. We begin public previews at the Shubert Theater, Chicago, on December 21, 2004, and then move to the Shubert Theater in New York, for an opening night of March 17, 2005. Exciting? Yes. Terrifying? You bet. Tickets available? Actually not in Chicago. We sold right out in a week! Even more terrifying. But yes for Broadway.
So how did it all come to be? Flashback to London in 1986, where I am playing Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, for Jonathan Miller in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the English National Opera. Each night I rewrote the lyrics of “The Little List Song” reflecting what was currently in the news. I was getting big laughs. I became convinced that the musical comedy theater is not only the most fun in a theater but that it was certain to return to popularity after the long desert years of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, when there was little to laugh at but the acting …. I wanted to be ready and write one. John Du Prez and I spent the next fifteen years trying to create and sell a comedy musical. It was to be a long and frustrating period.
We first tried adapting an old screenplay of mine called The Road to Mars. This was a bit of nonsense about the future of show business known for a while nauseatingly enough as Outta Space! (Ouch.) It was about a couple of comedians on the road in space but the best moments featured a chorus of quite possibly gay Welsh robots singing to a diva they adored:
Do we love Irena Kent?
Yes we do. Yes we do.
Is she down from heaven sent?
Yes she be. You can bet your sweet arse she be.
It’s still the first gay white Negro spiritual. Nobody bought it.
Our next venture was a musical version of The Owl and the Pussycat that we wrote as an animated film. I spun a tale from the Edward Lear poem, and John and I wrote some songs in a tiny Cabanon in Provence.
Shopping! We’re always happy when we’re shopping!
We’re always happy when we shop until we drop
In search of bargains we will never stop!
When God created the Universe
He pulled out all the stops
First He created all mankind
And then She created shops.
Shopping we’re always happy when we’re shopping
We’re always happy when we shop until we drop
In search of bargains we will never stop stop stop
We’ll shop and shop and shop, shop, shop!
In Hollywood, working on Casper, I pitched this project to Steven Spielberg, but no one on this side of the pond had ever heard of Edward Lear and everyone kept mentioning Barbra Streisand. Ultimately I turned The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat into a book for my daughter, and John and I recorded it, with ten songs, for Dove books, for which I later received a Grammy nomination. (Of course I didn’t win. Charles Kuralt won it posthumously. I do think you should be alive to win an award. It simply isn’t fair competing with dead guys.)
In all these years of hopeful collaboration JDP and I did manage to make a musical, albeit only on the radio. We began writing Behind the Crease at first called Sticky Wicket in March l986, originally for the stage. It was eventually recorded in front of a live audience for BBC Radio Four in April 1990. An original story, based on a real life experience of mine in the West Indies, this was a satire about the three things the British care most about: sex, royalty, and cricket.
“Couldn’t get a dog in it, could you, Des?”
I played Desmond Boyle, a seedy tabloid journalist on the trail of the sex life of a famous cricketer. We recorded it live in front of a BBC audience, with a small eight-piece band conducted by John Du Prez. It got huge laughs and applause, and was eventually broadcast by the BBC. John and I were somewhat encouraged by this limited success, and there was talk of a TV version and options and even a couple of drafts for London Weekend Television, before this too slipped into the sand.
At some point over the long and frustrating years, I told John Du Prez about an idea I had to adapt The Holy Grail, and he loved it and was most encouraging, but would the Pythons ever permit it? The history of post-Python projects has been like middle-age courtship, fraught with frustration. Byzantine negotiations, hot flashes, disappointing flurries of enthusiasm usually ending in stalemate, and droopy disappointment. And would anybody ever back such a silly idea?
I became convinced that The Grail might really work on stage at the opening night of The Producers in New York. Sometime in the late 1980s I had visited Mel Brooks in his office in L.A. He utterly embarrassed me by entering on his knees, making obeisance to me and salaaming low to the ground, while uttering high and flattering praise, to the utter disbelief of his entire office staff. Mel Brooks was on his knees at my feet! I didn’t know what to do. I was the first Python he’d ever met, so I copped the full force of his admiration for Monty Python. When I finally persuaded him to stand up, I revealed why I was there: to ask him if I might turn his movie The Producers into a stage musical. Jonathan Miller had just been given the Old Vic Theater to run for a year and we thought it would make a terrific stage show.
“Let me write the songs and adapt the book,” I suggested to Mel, “then I could play Bloom and you could play Bialistock on the London stage, directed by Jonathan.”
Mel was utterly unexcited by the thought of appearing on the boards again.
“I don’t want to do that right now,” he said. “I want to continue directing movies.”
What, pass on the chance to appear nightly on stage in South London just to hang around and direct movies in Hollywood? Madness.
“It would make a great musical, Mel,” I said….
Now, fifteen years later, the Seig-Heiling pigeons were coming home to roost! From the very first number at the New York opening of The Producers in February 2001 it was clear to me that it was a huge hit. Wildly, wonderfully and wittily directed by Susan Stroehman, it was a sheer joy to witness. When Mel came onstage at the end, the house went wild. I had been right. At last—a musical comedy. What John Du Prez and I had been trying to create for fifteen years. And maybe, I thought, just maybe I was right about The Holy Grail. Perhaps now it would be possible to find people who would take it seriously. And maybe the Pythons wouldn’t say no. We decided that the only way to find out was to take the bull by the horns and try it. We agreed that I would write a book and JDP and I would do some songs “on spec” and see what happened.
Thank God for computers, because mine tells me I began writing the first draft of Spamalot on Monday December 31,2001. I had filled a small red spiral notebook with notes and sketches and now I downloaded the text of The Grail from one of the many illicit websites, which thankfully saved me all the bother of typing out the script, and I could paste and cut and rewrite as necessary. I worked hard and fast and early, usually starting at dawn with a cup of tea, a pencil and a plain piece of paper. It went well and I printed out a first draft on January 24, 2002, at 6:37 A.M.
On that same January day I met John Du Prez for breakfast at a deli in Studio City where I presented him with the still warm first draft. That night, to celebrate, we went to see a very funny all-male version of H.M.S. Pinafore somewhere on Melrose. Inspired by this particularly silly production of Gilbert and Sullivan, we started work writing the songs the next day at 9 A.M. on January 25. John and I are fairly prolific. We write fast. We’ll catch an idea and run with it, stopping to tape record snatches that we like. I’ll be frantically scribbling down lyrics on a legal pad and John will be at the keyboard polishing chords and changes and melody. Sometimes I play guitar along with his keyboard, sometimes not. Later I go back and revise the lyrics for individual songs. Usually it takes me about a day to hammer out a lyric for each song and then when we come to record it I’ll polish them again before we go into the studio. We like the studio. It helps us to focus our work. Songs come to life in there. We usually lay down a live track to get the feel of the song, John on keyboard, me on guitar, right there in the same room with Larry Mah, who plugs us directly into the board. Then I’ll have a rough stab at singing the lyric in his tiny triangular glass closet. There is just room for John and I to squeeze in together and add chorus voices. I usually leave them to it after lunch and when I hear the songs again they have been totally transformed into magic: accordions, geese squawking, coconuts clacking, full orchestrations. It is truly amazing what you can do with John Du Prez, Larry Mah, and pro tools.
Looking back now at the first draft, I am struck by how little of the original lyrics we kept. In the text I had indicated areas where I felt we needed a song, but it was all still fairly loose. There were some completed lyrics, some snatches of doggerel, and some fairly sketchy rhyming gags to indicate song possibilities. Here and there we lifted a line for a song, or we picked up a theme from a suggestion, but there was a total sea change the minute John came on board. That’s the great thing about a partner, they get you to places you would never even have imagined. We got so into writing that at one point we ad libbed a complete song directly onto the tape recorder, John at the piano and me screaming lyrics. We just opened a vein and out the song poured. It is still our favorite song in the show and it was the one that all the Pythons immediately responded to. (“The Song That Goes Like This.”)
We wrote songs solidly for two and a half weeks and then went into Larry’s tiny garage studio in Sylmar for some fairly intense recording. The resulting CD is largely John and me on everything, though we did drag in Shawana Kemp, Jennifer Julian, and Samantha Harris, our girls from my 2000 tour, to add the essential glamor of female voices. Now it even sounded like Broadway. We finished the recording sessions at about 4 P.M. on February 27, when John drove straight to LAX to catch his flight back to the U.K., while I tinkered with a few last minute revisions. Five weeks in total since the time he touched down…
Of course, don’t get me wrong, this was only a first draft. I have learned one thing about writing and that it is all about rewriting. I have just completed draft #11 and we have chosen what we feel are the best of more than thirty songs. As I said, the great thing about a partner is they get you to places you could never imagine, and when Mike Nichols came on board, boy did we travel! He sent me scrambling back into the original for suggestions, picking up hints of character, constantly honing, tightening and polishing. He is the finest taskmaster. But at this point in the process we had a First Draft book and a CD of demo songs, and the next thing to do was approach the Pythons. How would they react? I sent them each a package and waited, nervously.
A Hard Day’s Knight
I have to confess that I think Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a very funny film. Even after three years working on the book, much of the original writing still makes me laugh out loud.
“You’re using coconuts.”
“What?”
“You’re using two halves of coconuts and banging ’em together.”
“I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
“Is there someone else we could talk to?”
It’s endearingly silly. It has a freshness and a simplicity which is rare. I think it has some of the same charm as A Hard Day’s Night: young men ignorant of what they are doing but supremely confident about doing it.
Arthur’s attempts to round up his knights and stop them bickering and running away is perfectly mock heroic. Almost epic. While dealing with large themes like the Quest for the Holy Grail the movie is really quite small in scale. Since the budget was a mere $400,000 we couldn’t afford armies or even horses (thank God for coconuts), and that means most of the scenes can be fairly easily reconstructed on stage. There are, of course, technical problems: Just how do you lop off people’s arms and legs on stage? But these are technical problems, which means somebody else has to solve them. That’s the great thing about being a writer….
The movie itself is discursive; characters pop up for one scene only to disappear immediately. Unless I was careful we would end up with a cast of sixty-eight: not good theater, and appalling economics. So it was always clear to me that our actors would have to play multi-roles. I also felt that we were missing good female parts for a Broadway show. I don’t know about you, but for me a show isn’t a show without leggy girls in spangly tights putting their legs over their heads, and that’s just backstage, but in the movie apart from the Witch and the memorable bathroom scene with Zoot and the Maidens who ask Galahad for a spanking, it’s all guys. I felt we needed to create a new part for the Lady of the Lake, who is referred to but doesn’t appear in the movie. All right, there is the Mother:
“Dennis, there’s some lovely mud over here!”
But, come on, that has to be a guy, doesn’t it? It’s a classic Terry Jones ratbag. Pure panto. Perhaps for American readers I should attempt to explain panto, since all English people grow up with it, and it’s probably the most popular form of theater in Britain. Here goes: the pantomime is a Christmas entertainment in the U.K., where the leading man is the principal boy who is played by a girl, who romances the leading girl in tights, so that two girls kiss onstage, while the stepmother of the girl is a man in drag, and her two ugly sisters are both men playing women…
I’ve lost you, haven’t I? You think we’re weird, don’t you? Let’s face it, your eyes have glossed over and you’re wondering how we ever managed to take an empire. It’s hopeless. It’s like trying to explain cricket to Americans. It’s utterly impossible. Let’s just say that panto is an odd hybrid of vaudeville, stand-up, drag show, variety, revue, Broadway musical and fairy tale. It’s full of double entendres and cheap theatrical effects—well Spamalot, really.
So, just how did the Pythons respond? Terry Jones was the first to reply. He called to say he loved it and was filled with enthusiasm. He had played the songs to his friends and they were all overjoyed. Next came an e-mail from Michael Palin:
First, fresh impressions. I loved most of it. Lots of good lyrics and very silly new songs which made me chuckle to the point of open, gurgling laughter. I think there is a core of very strong, very funny, catchy and very well-produced material here. Love and congratulations to all, M
Terry Gilliam too responded by e-mail:
El
I loved Spamalot a lot. I laughed. I danced. I pranced. What is wrong?
Tel
Even the great John Cleese responded enthusiastically:
I really enjoyed almost all of the songs. My personal favorite is “The Song That Goes Like This.” As I listened to it, I thought that the idea of parodying the kinds of songs you get in a certain type of annoying musical was wonderful. There were two other songs in the second act, both involving your female vocalist…which seem to be developing this theme. I’ve never come across it before, and it’s very original…
The blessed and venerable Jonesy even organized a meeting, so keen was he on the project.
Re Spamalot!
Terry G., Mike P. and John C. (via the electric telephone) and I all met yesterday to see what everybody else thought about Spamalot! There was an unnerving degree of agreement. First of all we all think it’s a jolly good project and that the songs and book are generally pretty spiffing. And I think we all think it could be a big success.
Terry G. and John were both (surprisingly) tempted to get more involved in the whole project because they thought it was so good, but were tempered by the feeling that it is really your project and that you wouldn’t appreciate interference from superannuated, white-haired ex-Pythons. There was a general agreement that the thing would get done more efficiently and effectively as your project. There was, however, a hope expressed that the rest of us could be useful as sounding boards and coming up with some ideas and thoughts and criticisms.
Wow! Not only did they like it, they wanted to help! It doesn’t get much better than that. Fired up by their enthusiasm and inspired by their encouragement, John Du Prez and I plunged into another writing session, using their criticisms and suggestions. The response to this new material was just as encouraging. This was Mike Palin:
I’ve listened to the new Spamalot material and like it very much. Knights of Ni song is jolly and superbly silly and I love “Whatever Happened to My Part?” A rather beautiful song and very funny idea. I particularly like the way it becomes Whatever Happened to This Show? and wondered if there might not be scope for it to escalate even further into Whatever Happened to This World, ending, via a series of climactic key changes into a great universal anthem of nostalgic longing. A huge cathartic moan.
Anyway, I think that generally the show is in an impressive state, full of life and good ideas…I think that the songs and jokes about Broadway are some of my favourite moments.
So, good work all round. Some great changes of mood and tempo, lovely melodies and, as I say, just a feeling of great, ebullient and redeeming silliness. Congratulations to all. Onwards and upwards,
Love M
Terry Gilliam wrote a very long and useful note clarifying his feelings about one of the songs, and added this…
I’m tempted to get involved with the design…however, my problem is that when I start thinking down those roads I start thinking of how it should be staged and then how the dance numbers ought to go and then……You can’t keep a bad director down, but I don’t want to do that job. However, there are some excellent chances to do some outrageous stuff. For example, puppets could be a visually fantastic other element. I’m talking about big puppets…giant three-headed knights…. dancing. I think the sets should be based on the medieval illustrated manuscript artwork I used for the animations. Then I think…I miss the Beast of Arghhh and it could prove useful as an element of different scale and pace. When I get like this I have to remind myself that I’m supposed to be busy directing films. And probably will be when you are trying to stage the show.40
So if he wasn’t going to do that job who was? And who was going to produce this show, which was now looking as though it could really happen. Tom Hoberman, my friend and lawyer, suggested Bill Haber.
“He’ll get it completely,” he said.
He did.
Bill is an extraordinary man. One of the four original partners who founded The Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, he has now moved on to producing shows on Broadway. His real life, though, is devoted to running the Save the Children charity, for which he flies tirelessly around the world. He has just returned from the Sudan; in the spring he flew to Baghdad. I have never known a finer man. His priorities are totally right. As he said to me recently, “He who dies with the most toys, dies.”
He came to visit me at my house. I had all the Holy Grail dolls out. I played him the CD and laid the script on him, but it didn’t matter: He was already in! It was the easiest pitch of my life. At the doorway on his way out we discussed who we might get to direct it.
“Well, Mike would be great,” I said.
“Mike Nichols?” He laughed. “Never in a hundred years,” he said. “Mike’s a friend of mine, but he is so busy you can hardly even get him to read something. It’ll probably take him ages to even respond.”
But what the hell, might as well give it a try, we thought.
Three days later Mike Nichols called. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said.
Wow, my cup runneth over! In a few short months we had managed to achieve a project which everyone had said yes to. You know how rare this is? Now came the anticlimax. It was time to make a deal with everyone. Time to go to the Broadway lawyers. Almost nine months of frustration followed. I guess that’s what lawyers are for. In fact, we spent more on the lawyers than the entire total budget of the original movie! But then again, that’s what lawyers do ….
Now, under our great and good leader Mike Nichols we have had two hugely hilarious reads. The most recent, with David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry, and Hank Azaria, was a hoot and now they, too, are on board. We have a great cast, a great choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, and amazing sets designed by Tim Hatley, a man who really understands panto! We begin rehearsals next week. It’s very exciting, but it’s Broadway. Millions of dollars can disappear overnight in a bunch of damp hankies. We can go off the rails at any stage, but we are dedicated to laughter, and if we fail to achieve at least that in Chicago I will be very surprised. Fingers crossed. Wish us well. And come and see us!