Let’s Go To Spamalot (Even Though It Is A Silly Place)

By Scott Farrell

©2009, Chivalry Today Educational Program

Regular listeners of the Chivalry Today Podcast know we’ve kicked off our fourth season with a show that included an interview with actor Christopher Gurr, who has just taken over the role of King Arthur in the touring company of the Tony award-winning musical Spamalot. The show is based on (or, as its creator, Eric Idle, says, “Lovingly ripped off from”) the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail (released, believe it or not, in 1975).

Last night (that’s “night” without a K) I got to see Spamalot, which, after my lengthy conversation with Gurr, gave me an opportunity to search for nuances and hidden messages within the show (as well as enjoying some classic bits and hilarious new material, of course).

Now, anyone attending Spamalot expecting a deep, thoughtful exploration of the values of chivalry and honor, or the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is going to be sadly disappointed. (They’ve replaced the Winchester Round Table with a roulette wheel, for Pete’s sake!)

The show is all about bringing the visuals and jokes from the venerable film to life on stage — and in that, Spamalot succeeds delightfully. There are a variety of effects and production pieces that provide great visual humor — from the catapulted cow crushing Patsy to a pair of monks who provide “moving” scenery by rolling themselves in a backdrop. And there are also all the unforgettable scenes from the movie (“Bring out your dead,” and the knights who say “nee!”) that have been given just the right amount of updating.

Enjoyable as all that is, however, what keeps Spamalot from becoming nothing but a regurgitation of jokes that were getting old when President Obama was in high school are the performances, primarily those of Gurr and Merle Dandridge, who plays the Lady of the Lake.

Dandridge’s performance is rock-solid and her voice is stunning. The majority of the humor she brings to the stage comes from the vocal gymnastics she performs throughout the numbers — proving she is thoroughly capable of “over singing” any song. (You could easily imagine her as a finalist on “Camelot Idol.”)

Similarly, Gurr doesn’t mug for laughs or play Arthur as an empty-headed fop. While his knights find the humor in their roles, Gurr brings a sincerity and dignity to the character of Arthur — which, as he mentioned in the podcast, is the key to making the role, and the show, work. Even when Gurr is skipping about the stage with Patsy clopping coconut shells together to imitate hoofbeats, there’s an unmistakable regalness to Gurr’s carriage. He makes King Arthur the most emotionally engaging character in the show, and, even amid the wackiness, he makes the audience feel that King Arthur is the leader we all want to follow, and the ideal we all want to be.

It’s a metaphor that plays out very nicely in the first musical number of the second act, “Look On The Bright Side Of Life.” Arthur’s down in the dumps and feels his quest has failed. His knights all come out to cheer him up and, amid gloom and thunder, they all whip out their umbrellas and begin to sing, whistle and dance; suddenly the sun is shining all around them, even though it’s pouring rain up above.

It’s easy to miss if you’re tapping your toes to the music, but the heraldic symbol on King Arthur’s tabard in this show (just as in the original movie) is not the traditional lion, dragon or Virgin Mary … but a shining sun. And that symbol is perfectly mirrored on the surface of the umbrellas the knights twirl as they’re “singin’ in the rain.” The message is simple and nicely underplayed: Arthur is the sunshine on a rainy day.

Spamalot wasn’t created to reveal the emotional or moral depths of Arthurian legend, but this is just one of several moments in the show that demonstrate there is something thoughtful lurking under the jokes — a message that the image of King Arthur has been, is and always will be that ray of hope in an hour of darkness, the light of optimism and strength that glows even when the world seems cloaked in the clouds of doom.

Though he maybe galumphing across the stage, tap dancing on the Round Table or enduring the merciless taunts of the French soldiers, Gurr portrays King Arthur in a manner true to the chivalric ideals of the 13th century Spanish knight and author Ramon Llull, who observed that, “Hope is the principle instrument of the office of knighthood.” And whether it’s proving the power of hope and joy to overcome adversity, or just putting a smile on our faces, King Arthur and the cast of Spamalot succeed in their quest most nobly.

Spamalot runs in San Diego through Sept. 13; tickets are available through Broadway San Diego. The show also runs in San Jose, Tucson and Costa Mesa – more details are on the Spamalot website.

Summer Knight Surprises

By Scott Farrell

©2009, Chivalry Today Educational Program

www.ChivalryToday.com

The past three-day weekend marked the unofficial “end of summer.” Kids are all back in school, college campuses are bustling, and everyone’s returning to work and sharing pictures and tales of what they did and where they went over the summer.

Of course, I’d love to tell you I went on a lengthy tour of the castles and museums of Europe on a quest of discovery of the history and culture of knighthood … but for me (like many people this year) this was a summer for things a little closer to home. But, ironically, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a few pleasant, surprise (and completely serendipitous) encounters with the history of medieval knights.

Let me share them with you:

Meet Me (With Some Armor) In St. Louis

In August, I was traveling with a friend through the city of St. Louis, Missouri. We were on a quick business trip, and when I found myself with an hour to spare in the downtown area, I decided to take a stroll through the historic Forest Park, site of the 1904 World’s Fair.

Sadly, since I was there on a whim, I didn’t have nearly enough time to explore the many museums, gardens and activities that are housed in the park. But I was drawn to one very prominent feature: A bronze statue of a knight on horseback, which stands in front of a very impressive building on a hilltop overlooking the park.

The statue, it turns out, is a monument to the city’s namesake, St. Louis, also known as Louis IX, the famous crusader king of medieval France. The building, it turns out, is the celebrated St. Louis Art Museum, whose motto, “Dedicated to Art and Free to All,” is carved right above the front door.

Since the price was right, I decided to poke my nose in the door and ask one simple question: “Do you have any armor on display?” The docent directed me downstairs where I spent the half-hour I had to spare visiting the museum’s gallery of medieval armor — a small but respectable offering of late-medieval weaponry and knightly equipment, including a fine example of German “Maximilian” plate armor of the 16th century.

The armor gallery is obviously very popular with museum visitors — there’s even a “Family Guide To Arms & Armor” brochure available at the front desk that allows kids to properly identify every piece of a knight’s harness, from sallet to sabaton. Unfortunately, this very nice gallery of the armor-maker’s craft is tucked away in a remote corner of the basement, and is accompanied by relatively rudimentary historical information. The display is just ripe for an active interpretation to help visitors understand the craft, function and symbolism of medieval armor — and since there’s a beautiful patch of lawn right there under the gaze of the St. Louis statue, all the museum needs is the right person or group to coordinate a demonstration of arms and armor in action.

(And if anyone from the St. Louis Art Museum is reading this, please feel free to contact Chivalry Today!)

If you’re at all intrigued by medieval arms and armor and you’re in the St. Louis area – even for a few minutes! – be sure to stop by the Art Museum and visit the armor gallery (and enjoy a picnic lunch at the riverside in Forest Park).

A Cowboy’s Spurs Aren’t The Only Things Jingling

A few weeks later my wife and I decided to take a little “road trip” vacation before the start of school through the heart of California’s Gold Rush country. We spent several days driving along the back roads along both sides of the Sierra-Nevada mountain range, haunting the mining towns that the freeway system has bypassed. There are a lot of intriguing landmarks and historic monuments in this area, but when we got to the Calaveras County Historical Society & Museum (in the town made famous for the frog-jumping contest in Mark Twain’s short story) we were surprised to see a shirt of chain mail hanging in a display case at the back of the town museum. Medieval armor is not the sort of thing you expect to see in a quiet three-room museum upstairs from the Hall of Records (and town bookshop) in California’s prospecting country.

The story of the shirt of mail was displayed on a placard beneath the case: Apparently it was owned by the notorious outlaw George Washington Cox, who was arrested in Calaveras County and sentenced in the county courthouse (which is now part of the museum). The display said “armored protectors” like the one worn by Cox were not uncommon among men who spent time on the Western frontier, since the chain mail, worn underneath a shirt or coat, was essentially proof against arrows, tomahawks, Bowie knives and just about any other sort of weapon short of a sixgun. According to the museum, there was a relatively lucrative business being done in San Francisco crafting these shirts of mail for scouts, miners, homesteaders and anyone else heading out to the dangerous reaches of the Wild West.

It seems particularly ironic that the cowboys and gunslingers, sometimes called “knights of the Old West,” might, in fact, have been a little closer to their medieval counterparts in their equipment than anyone previously thought.

Of course, neither of these chance encounters with knightly arms and armor has anything to do with the principles of chivalry other than to serve as a reminder that references, artifacts and images of medieval culture sometimes pop up in the most unexpected of places. The more we study and understand the world of history — whether it’s armor and castles, or chivalry and the tales of the Round Table — the more we are prepared to understand the world we live in today.