For the kinds of shows they offer on their calendar, I can say with complete conviction that no other company in the region unleashes them with more splash and panache than Muhlenberg Summer Music Theatre.
Their productions invariably deliver the grandest and heaviest sets; the flashiest lighting; the nimblest hoofers; and the least timid of song belters.
Their casts and crews grab you by the chin early and firmly, and do just about all that can legally be done to keep your eyes focused on a stage engulfed in flaming orchestrations and rapid, square-shouldered, front-and-center line shoutings between curtains rise and fall.
If it werent called Music Theatre, it could just as easily be called Vaudeville.
Or, in this instance, Spamalot.
Spamalot, the stage re-imagining of the overtly self-conscious, full-length sketch comedy of the 1970s, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, emerges from a script every bit as vacuous as last seasons nonetheless splendidly mounted Crazy for You, and with infinitely inferior music.
But, none of that matters much when a production company with Gumby legs, booming baritones, a good set shop, and a gun-to-the head determination to entertain-you-even-if-it-kills-you, fully commits to taking control of the brains limbic system for two hours and fifteen minutes.
Let me cut to the chase and put it to you like this: You will enjoy almost every minute of it, and you will forget it the instant you walk out the door when its over. (Spam, in truth, was never intended as a movable feast.)
This is where I should offer you a brief synopsis of the show.
Not going to happen. The plays many strings are so intentionally tangled that any attempt to unravel them will immediately serve to lessen their entertainment value.
Suffice it to say that Spamalot isnt a line-by-line stage rendering of the determinedly messy film Holy Grail.
Yes, it shares characters and several bloody bits and business with its source.
But, Spamalot is a stand-alone comic dervish who offers nothing as pedestrian as a beginning, middle, or end to his wild spinning.
Aside from a persistent bent toward the scatological”middle-school age patter---Spamalot is full-range family fare. It may even be the least sexually implicit musical in the history of the English speaking stage.
The Divas Lament, sung by the lone female speaking character in the show, The Lady in the Lake (portrayed by the sweet-voiced Shani Hadjian) makes it pretty clear, if you werent already aware, that this show never intended to sell us the creaky chain mail romance of Camelot.
There simply are no roles in this show for women who contribute to anything resembling a narrative. And the closest character--- or should I say closet character--- who could pass for a raging romantic is Steve Bauders Sir Lancelot who comes out in the evenings one truly electrifying production number, His Name is Lancelot, a Barry Manilow-inspired song that clears the way for his courting of the shows most convincingly feminine character, Josh Shapiros sweet-faced Prince Herbert.
Bauder who theretofore had lumbered about the stage with the grace of a fallen oak, sheds his armor like a Chippendale and transforms abruptly into a bobble-head doll on Lid Poppers. It is one of those moments that instantly elevates a show from the level of amusing and places it firmly on that upper shelf reserved for highly entertaining.
Aside from that interlude--- the entire play is nothing but a series of loosely connected interludes--- the choreography is more silly walks than dancing.
And thats not a criticism. This show would grow wearisome quickly if it dared venture too far into more traditional, Broadway style, time consuming thumping.
The songs' Youll remember none of them, save one, and I dont believe you were intended to remember them, save one.
And that one, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, wasnt even written for this show.
We need to make note of the wonderful and tireless stock character/straight man in the production, Ed Bara's King Arthur, who needs to maintain a credible incredulity through dozens of comic setups, and whose soaring voice commands attention to even the most trifling of songs.
And perhaps the most endearing and functional of all the folks populating the stage is Jordan Elman in the economically named role of Patsy, lowly but fiercely loyal attendant to King Arthur, whose main purpose, both literally and figuratively, is to maintain the shows non-musical tempo by striking two cocoanut shells together, creating a sound intended to simulate that of a horse clopping down a cobblestone path, the unseen hobby horse His Highness feigns to be riding.
Let us also applaud the shows director, James Peck, for making all the right choices throughout the endeavor; designer, Curtis Dretsch, for the contributions his necessarily heavy set makes to the lightness of the staging; conductor, Vince Di Mura, whose lightning quick responses to cues keep everything moving apace (although frequently the actors, miked and artificially amplified, were drowned out in the process); and choreographer, Samuel Antonio Reyes, for intuiting just what dancing needs to do and not to do in this play.
Spamalot continues through July 27, 2014 in the Dorothy Hess Baker Theatre of the Trexler Pavilion for Theatre and Dance on the campus of Muhlenberg College.
For ticket information, please visit http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/academics/theatre-dance/smt/spamalot.html