Spamalot Review: A Musical Revival That Pitches Itself to the TikTok Generation
7 / 10
It’s not that either of those songs weren’t funny originally. Spamalot, as staged by the late Mike Nichols in that dominant premiere, was a giddy delight from top to bottom. And the original cast album remains a testament to the show’s scrumptiously irreverent good nature, the cleverness of Eric Idle’s lyrics, and the razzle-dazzle buoyancy of Idle and John Du Prez’s music. But not every joke told 18 years ago is going to land the same way now. Indeed, in its restaging, Spamalot has become a sort of musical theater palimpsest, a monument to what we found funny in America in 2005 resting on a pedestal of 1970s British absurdism, newly draped with some 2023 fabrics intended to keep those older structures from corroding.
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