Spamalot (1 comment)
Spamalot was awesome. I'm generally not one to get excited about musical theatre, but this was funny musical theatre. A few scenes were acted out verbatim from the film ("huge... tracts of land!"), but adds a good deal of new material, with a nice meta twist. The Lady of the Lake sings about how little stage time she's getting and King Arthur (Tim Curry) finds his way to Broadway after David Hyde-Pierce sings a brilliant number explaining what sorts of things a play needs to have for Broadway success. Most of the plot is loosely based on the original film and expanded on to show the recruitment of Arthur's knights (Dennis the Peasant + Sir Gallahad = Sir Dennis Gallahad) and to take advantage of modern socially-acceptable humor ("Bet you're gay." "No I'm not." + 29 years = Hank Azaria's armor being pulled off by flamenco dancers to reveal a bright orange lycra tank top beneath). Great show.
Since Mel has long been a huge Tim Curry fan (via The Rocky Horror Picture Show, we hung around later to see if the principles would be taking some time to sign autographs before they went to the cast party. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong exit and missed most of them, including Eric Idle, which left me a bit disappointed. We'll just have to go to Broadway sometime.
Elsewhere in the world, North Korea is running a media campaign to inform male citizens of the five state-approved hairstyles, none of which allow hair longer than 5 cm. From the bbc article:
It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development," noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Gotta love those socialists. Personally, I'm a fan of the classic hairstyle for those with plenty of "human intelligence development."
All those quotes reminded me that Tree gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation for Christmas. I'm very much looking forward to reading it.