Vacationing In Someone Else's Despair

[thedrifter]

SteynOnStage
VACATIONING IN SOMEONE ELSE'S DESPAIR
My Name Is Rachel Corrie

The West End of the 1980s was nobody’s idea of a belle epoque but it nevertheless had its own insane panache. The hits, from Cats to Miss Saigon, were routinely dismissed as crowd-pleasing pap, though there seemed nothing obviously crowd-pleasing about T S Eliot’s poems or Madam Butterfly moved to the Vietnam war or any of the other source material for the big blockbusters. By contrast, the Broadway flops of the period were all based on can’t-fail crowd-pleasers which turned out to please nobody.

It feels different now. Walking around Shaftesbury Avenue for the first time in over a year, I thought the old girl was faking it. There’s a natural progression, from book to play to movie. When you do it the other way round, when quite so many of your hits are based on films, it offends the natural order, and gives the project a whiff of desperation. I take the producers’ word for it that Mary Poppins and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang are smash hits, and what used to be called the secondary creative talent – directors, designers, choreographers – have done a grand job with the material. But there’s something faintly unworthy about it. Les Miserables and Starlight Express were nobody’s idea of surefire hits; Mary and Chitty seem like British versions of the frantic Broadway recycling of proven franchises.

Adding to the general air of high-priced karaoke are the compilation shows – take the back catalogue of the rock group Queen and string a plot around it – or the tacky biotuners, like The Rat Pack, in which pimply uncharismatic nondescripts hack their way through Frank, Dino and Sammy’s swingers with all the finger-snappy style of open-mike night at a bad steakhouse. “You got a beat like a cop,” as Sinatra was wont to chide leaden conductors. It is a remarkable feat to be able to take such singular lives and make them utterly pedestrian.

The latest ill-advised valentine is My Name Is Rachel Corrie, at the Royal Court. Miss Corrie did not sing or dance or front a rock group; rather, she was a young American lady crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza two years ago. But, like Queen and Sinatra, she left a back catalogue – miscellaneous writings, from her Fifth Grade “Press Conference on World Hunger” back in Olympia, Washington (“I’m here because I care”) to the e-mails she sent home from the Palestinian territories (“Today I tried to learn to say ‘Bush is a tool’, but I don’t think it translated quite right”). Alan Rickman, star of stage and screen, and Katharine Viner, of The Guardian, have turned Miss Corrie’s words into a compilation show, a biotuner of her life sent to a contented unison hum of great progressive minds thinking alike. Rachel Corrie is no Sammy Davis Jr, but she surely is a more complex figure than that presented here. After her death made her a martyr for the Palestinian cause, Internet bloggers who disliked the instant beatification began running pictures of a headscarved Corrie, her face contorted in what’s either hate or a persuasive facsimile thereof, torching the Stars & Stripes at some Palestinian demo. The Royal Court’s playbill prefers another image: a family snap of Rachel in the garden, aged maybe seven or so, wind in her blonde hair, a cute pink T-shirt. She is a child, an innocent, and the play works hard to blur the lines between that photograph and the activist living in Gaza with Palestinian “militants”.

Directed by Rickman, My Name… is a one-woman show in which Megan Dodds plays Corrie as an idealized naïf. We meet her as a gawky teen sprawled on her bed in a very messy room. “Each morning,” she begins, “I wake up in my red bedroom that seemed like genius when I painted it, but looks more and more like carnage these days. I blink for a minute. I get ready to write down some dreams or a page in my diary or draw some very important maps. And then the ceiling tries to devour me.”

Ah, yes. A teen journal by someone who already knows she’s going to be a writer. She spends much of her time, she tells us, “imagining I live in a Mountain Dew commercial. I am always on the beach with a bevy of sinewed friends and we are always dancing.”

Sometimes she plays like a Lonely Hearts ad that’s trying too hard: “Okay, I’m Rachel. Sometimes I wear ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I wear polyester. Sometimes I take off all my clothes and swim naked at the beach. I don’t believe in fate but my astrological sign is Aries, the ram, and my sign on the Chinese zodiac is the sheep, and the name Rachel means sheep but I’ve got a fire in my belly.” If you like pina colada and getting caught in the rain, write me enclosing a recent photograph.

And sometimes she isn’t so much self-aware as self-aware of her self-awareness. Writing of weekend strolls with an ex-boyfriend, she observes, “Colin always wanted to walk faster and I wanted to trudge and identify ferns.”

Miss Dodds and Rickman are canny enough in their sentimental agitprop to play up the gaucheness, to establish it as part of the character’s charm. We know how this story ends and that knowledge is supposed to invest the goofy all-American teen rambling with the burthen of fate. It certainly worked with Michael Billington, the long-time heavyweight of The Guardian’s arts pages. “What comes as a shock is realising that she combined an activist’s passion with an artist’s sensibility,” he wrote. “Louis MacNeice once yearned for a poet who was ‘informed in economics, actively interested in politics’. Rachel Corrie emerges as just such a person. Writing was clearly in her blood… She itemises the people she would like to hang out with in eternity; significantly, they are mainly writers, including Rilke, ee cummings, Gertrude Stein and Zelda Fitzgerald.”

Oh, come off it. The significance of those names is not that they’re “writers” but that they’re an impressionable teen’s quaintly clichéd idea of what a hip writer is meant to be, from the lower case cummings to the basket-case Zelda. That’s what makes it likeable: The world didn’t lose a great writer when Rachel Corrie got crushed by a bulldozer, and, whether or not her parents (who made this material available) appreciate that, Rickman and Viner seem to, and make it serve their purpose. The precocious self-absorption infantilises not just Miss Corrie but ultimately the Palestinians whose cause she champions: like that picture on the playbill, they too are children, innocents in a poisoned garden.

The Middle East pops up casually – “Yesterday I heard from Chris in Gaza. I am being invited there…” So Rachel sets off to be a “human shield”, leaving her home phone number with The Olympian in case they want to contact her and giving a word of advice to Mom on dealing with the press: “If you talk about the ‘cycle of violence’, or ‘an eye for an eye’, you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world.”

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Fair enough. Those empty phrases are used to avoid hard choices: equivalence is mostly false and the plague-on-both-their-houses line is the lamest refuge of pompous commentators. And at least we now know where Rachel stands. There’s no sense of any political journey: as presented here, her views on Palestine emerge fully formed from the jumble of random thoughts on boys, great writers and endangered owls. And suddenly it’s January 2003 and she’s flying to Jerusalem.

In a spirited if somewhat underpowered performance vocally, Megan Dodds can’t quite make this transition work, because it feels fake. Rachel Corrie was born in 1979 and is just shy of her 24th birthday for most of the action of this play. Yet Rickman and Viner choose to introduce her to us as an adolescent. Other 23-year olds are doing dull jobs, or exciting jobs, or finishing up college on the other side of the country, or raising babies, but Rachel seems still to be a high-schooler letting us in on the giggly confidences of her teen diary. For her parents in licensing this production, this is an understandable choice: they’ve lost a child and it’s the child in her they want to hold on to. But for the authors and director it seems rather more calculated. Indeed, Hildegard Bechtler’s set – a kid’s bedroom in her parents’ house piled with the debris of adolescence – seems explicitly designed to prevent us regarding Rachel as a fully-formed adult.

Bechtler and Rickman pull off the transformation in the narrative very adroitly: she pushes aside her teenager’s bed and the mounds of trainers and sweatshirts and kiddie posters, and walks along ugly bare concrete to a new mound – rubble this time, and a parched tree: the ruins of Israeli-oppressed Palestine. We’re meant to see this as a revelation, a literal broadening of the horizon, an end to pampered parochialism. Wandering round the Holy Land as a terror tourist, she reads to us random jottings from her journal: “January 27th: An attack in Gaza the night before last killed 14 and injured around 30.”

Which is true. Except that it’s not quite the whole story. The statistic is relayed to us as a typical night in Gaza City, whereas in fact it was the launch of an unprecedented offensive by the IDF against the town’s terror nests: it was exceptional, not routine.

Perhaps it would make no difference even if we knew that. The British columnist Melanie Phillips reported recently that a friend of hers had gone into Blackwell’s, Oxford’s famous university bookshop, and asked if they had a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s book The Case For Israel. “There is no case for Israel,” replied the clerk. Just so: in Britain as (for different reasons) in the rest of Europe, there is no case for Israel. Even those who are pro-Bush and pro-war incline – like Tony Blair – to the Palestinian side when the question of “the Middle East peace process” rears its ugly head. As for the patrician right, they’ve never cared for the Jew, especially the Zionist Jew: too pushy and self-reliant, they make hopeless colonial subjects. “All British officials tend to become pro-Arab, or, perhaps, more accurately anti-Jew,” wrote Sir John Hope-Simpson in the Twenties wrapping up a tour of duty in mandatory Palestine. “Personally, I can quite well understand this trait. The helplessness of the fellah appeals to the British official. The offensive assertion of the Jewish immigrant is, on the other hand, repellent.”

Exactly. Progressive transnational humanitarianism, as much as old-school colonialism, prefers its clientele “helpless”, and, despite Iranian weaponry and Saudi money, the support of a 300 million-strong Arab Muslim bloc and the depraved human sacrifice of their own schoolchildren, the Palestinians have been masters at selling their “helplessness” to the west. When Rachel Corrie talks about “a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world”, she’s peddling the standard line: the Palestinians have no tanks, so they have to improvise with what they can lay their hands on – plastic explosives, schoolgirl delivery systems. In fact, not too long ago the Gaza and West Bank Arabs had plenty of tanks: the only reason they’re living under “Israeli occupation” is because in 1967 their then governments in Jordan and Egypt sent their heavy machinery into action against the Zionist entity once too often. Indeed, the first 25 years of Israel’s existence were spent fending off Arab tanks. Alas, ever since King Hussein fired his British general, Sir John Glubb, the Arabs have been total flops at conventional warfare. Fortunately for them, they discovered that, when it comes to undermining Israel, playing helpless and recruiting western patsies like Rachel Corrie is actually far more effective.

For me, the essence of the Arab/Israeli conflict is summed up in those periodic announcements that Yasser Arafat, the Saudi Crown Prince or whoever it is this month has agreed to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. The fact that the “right to exist” is something to be negotiated gets to the heart of the problem. But I learned long ago that Britons and Europeans are impervious even to the politest debate on this issue. When one looks at the reviews for My Name Is Rachel Corrie, it’s not the effusions from The Guardian, The Independent and other Fleet Street lefties that depress one, but the fact that the conservative press shares all their assumptions. Take the Telegraph, which mainly on the grounds that it employs me and (until recently) Barbara Amiel is frequently dismissed as a Zionist shill. If only. The Sunday Telegraph’s reviewer, Emma Gosnell, wrote as follows: “Corrie was murdered two years ago, only two months after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation in Gaza.”

“Murdered”? She was run over by a bulldozer while playing “human shield” in a war zone. Sad and regrettable, but murder? Did no Telegraph editor query that word? To be fair, Miss Gosnell’s characterization of the International Solidarity Movement as a “non-violent Palestinian resistance movement” is less offensive than slippery dissembling formulations like “peace movement”. The play, in fact, does not mention the organization by name. The reality is that nobody in Britain or Europe is interested in hearing these arguments. If they were, you might have a livelier show. Indeed, My Name... is a classic example of George S Kaufman’s definition of a success d’estime – a success that runs out of steam. It got great reviews, was widely admired, but simply because its one-sidedness is taken for granted by all right-thinking people it never really took off as a bona fide “controversy”.

Nonetheless, while undoubtedly distressing to those who think there is “a case for Israel”, Rickman and Viner’s play is a fascinating study in the lengths one has to go to to keep the Palestinians in their approved “helpless victim” state. For example, when Rachel arrives in Gaza to begin her activities as a human shield, you notice that her “writing” voice settles into two distinctive styles. When she’s discussing Israel, she’s all business – very reportorial:

We stopped and Jenny requested to talk to the commanding officer. A white truck with a blue light rolled up and the person in the truck spoke over the loudspeaker. Told us to leave, stated, ‘You’ll get the body later…’

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Etc.

But, when she’s discussing the Arabs, it’s vague, elliptical, impressionistic – all images:

February 4th.

In Dr Samir’s garden.

Fig tree with small buds. Dill, lettuce, garlic. White plastic chairs, deflated soccer ball, blanket drying on a line. Patchy lawn, long shadows. Two bulldozers, tanks.

The effect is to make you wonder why, when Miss Corrie is determined to bring the IDF into sharp focus, she’s even more determined to make the Palestinians a blur, forever smearing the Vaseline over the lens as if the Arabs are a Hollywood actress of a certain age. What’s she worried about? That if you fill in the gaps, connect up the local color, toss a verb or two into that vegetable patch, the wispy evocations might harden into something more complex and disquieting?

Rachel Corrie was a telegenic naïf who died needlessly while vacationing in somewhat else’s despair, and neither Shakespeare nor Sophocles could upgrade that bleak precis into a big statement on the Palestinian cause. “Theatre has no obligation to give a complete picture,” wrote Michael Billington in his Guardian review. “Its only duty is to be honest.” True. But the lack of “completeness” here borders on the freakish. Miss Bechtler’s teenybopper set is, presumably, intended to contrast both the innocence and comfort of Miss Corrie’s young life with the brutal reality of “occupation”. Instead, it suggests that the play’s creators will go to any lengths to avoid presenting their protagonist as what she is: a grown-up woman. If you’d been killed at 23, would a play restricting you to your childhood bedroom capture the reality of your life at that point? Of course not. But, in that sense, Rachel herself becomes an unintentional metaphor for how progressive opinion views the Palestinians’ – confined to her bedroom in her parents’ home even though she’s a woman in her mid-20s, just as the equally eternally child-like Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are confined to their “refugee” “camps” under the benign tutelage of the UN. Given the western progressive’s long condescension to the Palestinians with whom he so sympathises, it seems appropriate that the most successful London play about this subject in years should end with a Fifth Grader’s speech about world peace.

Sixty years ago, Europeans thought Jews shouldn’t be in Europe. Now they think they shouldn’t be in Palestine. It seems reasonable to conclude that on the whole they’d rather Jews weren’t anywhere. That’s why it’s so important to keep everything soft-focus and child-like and innocent. But the beatification of Rachel Corrie is only possible if you ignore anything above Fifth Grade level. “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance,” says Rachel. That’s not the impression I’ve ever got from my brief visits to the “occupied territories” where, “as far as I can tell”, every aspect of daily life – from the glorification of “martyrs” on the walls of the grocery store to the “I Want To Be A Martyr When I Grow Up” competitions at the schoolhouse – exists within a culture of death. It’s not about “independence” or “resistance” but something more basic. As Tom Gross and Robin Stamler noted in a withering Internet post, there are some plays you won’t be seeing at the Royal Court any time soon:

1. My Name Is Rachel Levy (Israeli girl age 17, blown up in a grocery store)
2. My Name Is Rachel Thaler (Israeli girl aged 16, blown up in a pizzeria)
3. My Name Is Rachel Levi (Israeli girl aged 19, murdered while waiting for the bus)
4. My Name Is Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband and son while at home)
5. My Name Is Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a cafe)
6. My Name Is Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 6 while sitting at home)

Billington is right: Theatre has no obligation to give a complete picture. But, when the part of it you choose to show has to be quite so cosseted and insulated from anything that might challenge or question it, something is badly wrong.
The New Criterion, June 2005



DEAD PARODY SKETCH
Monty Python's Spamalot

Everybody who goes to the theatre with any frequency wants to be in on a hit. A real hit – like the first night of My Fair Lady must have felt, or Oklahoma! And most seasons the closest you come is a show you sense is vaguely good for you – a Wicked or a Ragtime or late Sondheim or the legions of Sondheim clones, shows you admire rather than enjoy.

And, after a while, a critic begins to feel a little guilty about all the unenjoyable shows he’s admired for free and then suckered the paying customers into ponying up $101.50 per ticket into suffering through.

Which preamble is by way of saying that, every year or two on Broadway, a lot of pressure builds up to declare a real hit, and like a boil it has to be lanced. This spring’s lance is Spamalot, which has a lot of lances, as well as a Lancelot (a gay Lancelot, naturally). And, at the Shubert Theatre, it’s become the happy beneficiary of Broadway’s perennial desperation to find an authentic smash. In The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz even went so far as to posit an entire new Golden Age on the peg of Spamalot’s triumphant notices, in a feature headlined, “Musicals Are Back!” In the collected works, this will make a nice companion piece to his Weekly Standard column on the opening of Chicago a couple of years ago proclaiming the return of the Hollywood musical. Hollywood musicals aren’t back, of course. Chicago was a fabulously successful one-off that followed the rule Bob Fosse established with his film of Cabaret over three decades ago – that for a musical to get past a modern movie audience it has to eschew the defining act of musicals – the moment when a boy and girl are walking down the street chit-chatting and the orchestra strikes up underneath and next thing you know they’re not talking but singing. Chicago ducked that challenge: it’s a “concept musical” staged as a cynical “vaudeville”, and movie audiences bought it in a way they wouldn’t buy Gordon MacRae bringing Shirley Jones up to speed on “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top”.

Broadway has a slightly different problem. Audiences will still accept a guy breaking into a big love song, but unfortunately there’s no-one writing the stuff. So instead we get shows like Spamalot, which is, as the marquee boasts, “lovingly ripped off” from the movie Monty Python And The Holy Grail – not to mention just about every other Python routine they can squeeze in. Getting on for four decades after their debut on the BBC, the Pythons have an enduring fan base that can still recite every word of the dead parrot sketch, and the “nudge-nudge, say no more, your wife a goer?” sketch, and the “is this the right room for an argument?” sketch. Only the other day, a correspondent of the London Times got an entire column on American foreign policy by riffing off the “what have the Romans ever done for us?” scene from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.

Python is not obvious material for a musical, but the sources for hit shows rarely are. Spamalot is the work (mostly) of Python Eric Idle, so purists can’t complain. Composer John du Prez has been drafted to help him out with the score, and hit-maker Mike Nichols was signed up to put a Broadway sheen on it, and the cast boasts relatively big names – Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria. The finished product is part adaptation of the original movie; part parody of Broadway musicals; and part compilation show, reprising all the best-loved Python sketches in the way that Mamma Mia reprises all the best-loved Abba songs.

The opening captures the flavor as well as anything: The curtain rises on a map of England in the year 932 as a voiceover fills us in on the general historical background – knights, round table, quest for the Holy Grail – concluding with, “This man was Arthur, King of the Britons. For this was England!” Then a chorus of Finnish folk dancers come on and sing, “You simply can’t go wrong/In traditional fish-schlapping song”, and hop about slapping each other with the aforementioned fishes before winding up with, “Finland, Finland, Finland, that’s the country for me!”

“I said ‘England’,” snaps the narrator. The embarrassed folk dancers apologise for mishearing and scurry away.

A successful musical uses the opening to set up its own rules, its own language: My Fair Lady has a longish dialogue scene, to let you know this is a show about words, and then Professor Higgins goes into “Why Can’t The English Learn To Speak?” – and there’s the theme of the play spelled out for you. Conversely, West Side Story begins with no words, spoken or sung, but instead a musical “Prologue” to accompany the Sharks and Jets dancing out their mutual hostility, thereby indicating the symphonic and choreographic ambitions of the piece and letting you know the drama will be told through movement as much as anything else.

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So what’s the opening of Spamalot telling us? Well, it’s reassuring us it will remain true to the anarchic, eclectic spirit of the TV show. The catchphrase, you may recall, was “And now for something completely different.” Instead of working up to a conventional punchline, the Pythons would simply gatecrash the sketch with “something completely different” and move on to the next bit. In their search for a Broadway equivalent of the Python tempo, Idle and Nichols in effect deconstruct the modern musical: a production number erroneously premised on a misheard line of dialogue is, after all, both a wacky inversion of traditional ideas about “dramatic integration”, and at the same time a kind of integration all of its own.

Well, that’s my theory. If you’ve never seen Monty Python before, the whole thing may leave you cold. There’s plot rather than narrative – that’s to say, events occur and it’s necessary that they occur in a particular order, but there’s no dramatic arc worth your emotional investment. The leading players are tonally right: Tim Curry and David Hyde Pierce have a clipped articulate briskness that’s “school of Cleese” rather than a specific impression. And John Cleese himself is on hand, at least electronically, as a voice from above – or, as he bellows from the heavens, “I’m God, you stupid tit.” In Britain, his compatriots’ affection for him has been somewhat diminished by his apparent transformation over 30 years into the kind of petty bossy bureaucratic hectoring tinpot he once merely parodied. The joke all those decades ago was the novelty of hearing a civil servant or bank manager or some such well-spoken fellow call you a “stupid tit”. That doesn’t seem quite so fresh in the pop culture of 2005, and to these ears a lot of the laughter sounded more than a little forced.

On the other hand, Eric Idle’s new material finds even forced laughs a lot harder to come by. But Nichols keep things moving with tremendous panache and even manages to recreate quintessentially celluloid moments such as the limbless Black Knight who refuses to admit he’s lost the battle even after his arms and legs have been cut off. I doubt whether the director would have seen eye to eye with the Pythons in their heyday, when he was busy directing everything from The Graduate to Annie. Nichols’ core value is professionalism: he may not be able to make your show good, but he’ll make it work. Monty Python was the antithesis of that, a subversive variation on a strain of British entertainment one might loosely call “the charm of amateurishness”: in disdaining the “tyranny of the punchline”, the Pythons were in part rejecting polish and perfection as too Hollywood, too Broadway. I suspect that back in the Seventies they wouldn’t have cared for what Nichols has done to their material. Now they seem happy to let him squeeze some last mileage out of the back catalogue in a hitherto untapped market. You can buy amusing souvenir T-shirts in the lobby, but who needs them? For patrons of a certain age, the show itself is a souvenir of their adolescence.

But that’s really a minor complaint. The reason I dissent from the Podhoretz thesis is that I don’t believe you can have a grand comeback for the Broadway musical unless you’ve got the music. For purposes of comparison, consider a previous Arthurian musical – not Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, but A Connecticut Yankee, a Mark Twain musicalization from 1927. As in Spamalot, there was low comedy a-plenty. The eponymous hero, finding himself at King Arthur’s court, goes partying at Morgan Le Fay’s castle, where the band is playing bad jazz:

“They’re really finished musicians,” says Morgan.

“They will be if they don’t quit that,” says the Connecticut smartass.

That’s a Herbert Fields joke. He came from a distinguished line of funnymen. His sister Dorothy wrote Annie Get Your Gun; his brother Joe wrote Wonderful Town; his father Lew was one half of the double-act that gave us the timeless exchange “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?” “That was no lady, that was my wife.”

Herb Fields was reliable. All his gags were no better or worse than that finished-musicians crack. If you asked him to adapt Mark Twain or Kafka, Anne Of Green Gables or The Satanic Verses, that’s how it would come out. His work was consistent, and he always had plenty of it. But that’s not the reason anyone cares about A Connecticut Yankee today. Fields’ co-authors were a couple of guys called Rodgers and Hart and their score for the show included a glorious ballad (really a craftily disguised “art song”) “My Heart Stood Still” as well as a charm song whose delightful lyric finds romance among the archaisms of Arthurian English:

“Thou Swell
Thou witty
Thou sweet
Thou grand
Wouldst kiss me pretty?
Wouldst hold my hand?”

You can go into any record store 80 years later and find 50 albums with those two songs on – vocals, jazz, r’n’b, classical crossover, and all those rock stars undergoing their mid-life crises and making hideous CDs of standards. The reason we treasure A Connecticut Yankee is not because of the rowdy yuks but because of the music. In 1927, it was no big deal. That was the most crowded season in Broadway history – 264 first nights, new scores by Kern and Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Vincent Youmans. On December 26th alone, there were 11 Broadway openings, and, to cover them all, editors were forced to conscript sports reporters. One of the openings was Show Boat.

Flash forward eight decades. When it comes to the book, Eric Idle roams more widely than Herbert Fields. One of the best-received moments is Hank Azaria’s recreation of the “French Taunter” from the movie. “You empty-headed animal-food trough-wipers!” he sneers from the parapets of the castle. “I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!” Rabelaisian? Echoes of Ben Jonson (“I fart at thee”)? Whatever. It’s still a flatulence gag, but it has the whiff of sophistication about it.

But then we come to the songs. They’re what are loosely called parodies. Very loosely, in this case. Effective parody depends on precision, and Idle’s send-ups are too broad and generalized. Take his most famous song, “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”, which is extensively reprised at Spamalot. It’s not really a parody of those insanely optimistic chin-up songs, like the Great War blockbuster “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag (And Smile, Smile, Smile)”. And, even if it were a parody, better writers than Idle have been doing that for decades. P G Wodehouse in 1924:

“Shove all your worries in a great big box
And sit on the lid and grin!”

So “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” is less a parody of a chin-up song than an extremely bad chin-up song – a tune of no melodic or harmonic merit, a lyric that’s doggerel. What made it memorable was its context: it was sung by the condemned men as they’re hanging from the crosses in The Life Of Brian. Its deployment here isn’t in the same league, but it’s essentially a moment of nostalgia – you’re applauding your own warm affectionate memories of the original. That doesn’t alter the fact that the song is still rubbish.

As for the new material, Idle and his composing colleague John du Prez throw in everything they can think of. The big First Act number is supposed to be a parody of the balladic bombast with which Lloyd Webber and his ilk have replaced “My Heart Stood Still”. It’s called “The Song That Goes Like This”:

“A sentimental song
That casts a magic spell
They all will hum along
We’ll overact like hell…

“I’ll sing it in your face
While we both embrace
And then we change the key!
Now we’re into E
That’s awf’lly high for me
But everyone can see
We should have stayed in D…”

That’s efficient in a crude sort of way. But it’s not expert enough to skewer its target. When Mel Brooks was thinking of doing The Producers on Broadway, he went to see Jerry Herman, the composer of Hello, Dolly! and Mame, to ask him to write the songs. Instead, Herman sat down at the piano and played a medley of the movie songs Brooks has written over the years. In other words, you’re good enough to do this on your own. Herman was right. The title song of his hommage a Hitchcock, High Anxiety, is sung by Brooks as a psychiatrist called on to do a number in the piano bar of his hotel. It’s a parody of those flowing movie title-songs Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn used to write for Sinatra, and its eye for detail is faultless. The song’s release goes:

“My heart’s afraid to fly
It’s crashed before
But then you take my hand
My heart wants to soar!
What’s more…

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High Anxiety…”

That big vowel sound – “soar” – on the high note is an absolutely precise pastiche of Cahn & Van Heusen, and then Brooks tops it with the little two-note phrase and internal rhyme landing on a higher note still. Idle’s Lloyd Webber demolition-job sings about key changes; Brooks’ song just does them so well it feels instantly right.

That’s what’s so sad. There’s more harmonic invention in the verse of “My Heart Stood Still” than in the entire score of Spamalot. But you’d expect that: one’s Richard Rodgers, the other’s a TV comic larking about. But when a composer can’t rise to the level of Mel Brooks, something isn’t right. Idle’s rhyming dictionary has been working overtime: in the best of the new songs, “You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews),” David Hyde Pierce sings, “There’s a very small percentile/Who enjoy a dancing gentile” – and it gets a huge laugh. But it’s basically a very broad scattershot parody of the better parodies in The Producers.

How can you build a new era of Broadway musicals on parodies of musicals that have been extinct for decades? We’ve had thirty years of parodies – cynical parodies, like Kander and Ebb’s Chicago; exhibitionist parodies, like Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, where he does spoofs of composer-lyricist combinations that never actually existed; affectionate parodies, like Mel Brooks’ songs – and now, the photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy, a non-score by Eric Idle. Fifty years ago, Alan Jay Lerner had lunch with his publisher, Max Dreyfus of Chappell’s, and told him how much he’d enjoyed Wonderful Town and added that he thought the publishing house had a big hit on its hands with the Bernstein, Comden and Green loping ballad of homesickness, “Why-oh-why-oh-why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” Dreyfus shook his head. “The public knows they’re kidding.”

On Broadway these days, they’re all kidding. The great monolithic rock hegemony is over. The music business is fragmenting and more young singers are doing pop standards than at any time in the last 40 years and getting very rich at it. And yet the source of most of those pop standards – the Broadway stage – is unable to supply them with any new material. Johnny Mercer used to say, “Writing music takes more talent, but writing lyrics takes more courage.” What he meant was that whenever a guy opens his mouth and sings the umpteenth variation on “I love you” he risks being pelted with rotten fruit. You never really know whether a particular image is wistful or banal, tender or crass, until someone stands up there and does it. It’s easy to mock Lloyd Webber bombast like “All I Ask Of You”, but even at its worst that takes more courage than a dull parody about key changes.

There have always been unmusical musicals. In that sense, Spamalot has less in common with A Connecticut Yankee than with Hellzapoppin’, the Olsen and Johnson smash that opened in 1938, became the longest-running musical in Broadway history to date, and didn’t have one memorable song. It was, as nobody said at the time, very “cutting edge”: it opened with Hitler giving a rave review of the show in a Yiddish accent; it had workmen with ladders clambering through the auditorium forcing theatergoers to get out of their way; in the middle of the show a woman would scream she’d left her baby at the automat and run fleeing from the theatre. Zany, relentless, hugely profitable – and utterly forgotten.

For what it’s worth, I doubt whether Spamalot will even enjoy Hellzapoppin’’s success. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say this show will run out of audience a lot quicker than The Producers. But whether it runs six months or six years it certainly doesn’t represent the resurrection of the American musical: there is literally no future in shows like this.
The New Criterion, May 2005

Ellie