Review: MONTY PYTHON'S SPAMALOT at Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater
This touring revival runs through January 4
By: Alexander C. Kafka Dec. 19, 2025
Recently, there has been more drama in the Kennedy Center’s offices than in its performance spaces. That was certainly the case yesterday, as the hallowed landmark was — whatever the legality — rechristened the Trump-Kennedy Center by the president’s hand-picked board. Trump, the board’s chair, has been referring to it thusly for months but said he was surprised and honored by the change, quickly reified by new signage today.
If journalism is, as they say, the first draft of history, let the annals reflect that on the day of the rechristening, alongside Handel’s Messiah, there played a farce about a wildly narcissistic would-be king who, citing a mandate from God, assembles a group of inept, preening knights for a quest of murky exigency to Camelot (of all places!). Shrugging off the plights of the indigent and the ill, they encounter and engender a series of cheesy production numbers and meet their match in surprisingly irascible and irreverent Frenchmen. Let the actual historians, on second and subsequent drafts, interpret all this as they may.
D.C. politics aside, as an audience member nearby Thursday night observed, the world can be divided between Monty Python fans and Others. For those of us who spent recess on the blacktop of Bethesda Elementary School doing silly walks and chanting “We are the knights who say ‘Ni!’,” Monty Python’s Spamalot is essentially a souped-up medley of old Flying Circus and Python film classic bits. For the Others, like my long-suffering spouse, who was seated next to me last night, the 2004-05 musical is rousing and goofily amusing, but hardly riveting. We Python fans are accustomed — are we not? — to that baffled look given us by the Others.
As if to hedge their bets against those Others, Spamalot creators Eric Idle and composer John Du Prez spliced iconic Pythonisms with broader Forbidden Broadway-type stage spoofs, figuring that a viewer blind to the charms of farting Frenchmen might nonetheless enjoy showbiz sendups of divas, gays, and Jews. The strategy paid off in 2005 Tony and other awards, but this touring version of the 2023 Broadway revival, while diverting, feels a bit uneven and tired.
Director and choreographer Josh Rhodes here succeeds more as the latter than as the former. The talented ensemble’s tapping and hoofing are crackling and leave us wanting more, but the pacing of some elements like the setup of Sir Lancelot’s rescue mission weren’t firing on Thursday night, and some lines and lyrics were lost to sound-balance and enunciation problems (yes, beyond the crazy accents, falsettos, Bronx cheers, and whatnot).
Vocals were generally strong but the show puts the Lady of the Lake, especially, in a tough situation. She has to demonstrate enough vocal control that the character’s out-of-control melismatic contortions — worthy of Fergie at an NBA All-Star Game — are clearly meant to be out of control. Amanda Robles, with her mighty lungs and impressive pitch range, could have used more baseline control to highlight and contrast the off-the-rails leading-lady affectations. This is a problem not just with the performance but with the show’s score. Numbers like “Find Your Grail” and “Diva’s Lament” were cleverly conceived and placed but they were written lazily — they don’t have enough smart lyrics for a singer to really bite into and even finely imagined improvisations can’t pick up the slack. Robles fares far better with the more solid and inspired “The Song That Goes Like This” with Leo Roberts’s Sir Galahad.
Major Attaway is a delightfully self-important King Arthur who often looks like he’s on the verge of “breaking” at the comic antics of Roberts’s Black Knight and Chris Collins-Pisano’s French Taunter and Knight of Ni. Sean Bell, as brave Sir Robin, projects expressions well and has fine timing well-suited to conveying bodily functions. Scenes and projections by Paul Tate DePoo III are great fun and honor the spirit of Terry Gilliam’s Python animations. And the small orchestra, under the direction of Jonathan W. Gorst, played wonderfully.
In all, this Spamalot, while not particularly memorable, is a much-needed and pleasantly distracting counterbalance to Washington’s current political dramas.
**
Run time: About two and a half hours, including a 20-minute intermission
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