I saw Spamalot on Jan. 20 -- a touring company playing at the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Full cast; Richard Chamberlain was King Arthur, and I knew one or two of the other cast members, but alas the playbill is in a large pile of papers somewhere so I can't tell you who they were. I agree with the earlier reviewer on this board who said the second act is much better than the first. Something about the pacing is different, and the plot deviates a bit more from the movie so it's more interesting if you're familiar with the film. I didn't get the sense that anyone was trying to imitate Monty Python, though. The jokes had a very different sense of...comic timing, maybe, so it was the Monty Python jokes, but with a different spin.

Oh, one annoying thing--about 2/3rds of the actors tried some variety of an English accent. About half of those who tried sounded natural to my American ears, and the other half were Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins or worse. Very distracting.

I don't know if this is a general quality of the show, or just the production I saw, but the dancing in this production was highly superior to the singing. Everyone was an amazing dancer. The production was very energetic because of it. And even though I usually prefer singing over dancing, I enjoyed this production a lot; the cast was just having so much fun! I also found that it had a lot more ensemble male dancing than I'm used to seeing. Some of it was tap, true, but a lot of it was more traditional Broadway choreography and not done for comic effect. I can't think of another show that's even close in terms of having lots of men dancing without female partners. What I thought was the funniest moment of the show came in the middle of a Fiddler on the Roof dance parody, too. That said, while there were women involved, they had very little to do other than occasionally dance across the stage in sequined bikinis. I wouldn't have minded the gender imbalance too much except that the women were *so* gratuitous.

The best moment of the night came during the last scene with the Knights Who Say Ni. As you may know, during the bit where the head Knight reveals they are no longer the Knights Who Say Ni, the actor playing that head Knight is expected to improvise something silly for the new name. The day I saw the show was the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, so the actor started doing his nonsense patter, but ended it with "na na na na, na na na na, HEY DUBYA, GOODBYE!" (to the tune of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye") and the show stopped for a minute or two while the audience cheered.

Good show--not great--and a lot of fun. I'd definitely see it again. It's also one of the few shows that exceeded my expectations, if only because my expectations were "inferior copy of Monty Python film."

Les Misérables in the round...I actually saw this about a year ago at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, IL, but I thought it was worth talking about briefly. Les Mis is probably my favorite show on score/lyrics/libretto alone, but I'd never seen a production of it that I really liked. I loved this one, though. I'd been wondering for a while if it would work better stripped down on a small stage, and it really did. A fair number of the songs (I Dreamed a Dream is the big one I usually think of, but also a bunch of other numbers--the fight at Fantine's bedside between Javert and Valjean, the love songs at the beginning of the first act, and Javert's song Stars, just to name a few) work best as intimate moments between the characters and the audience in a way that's really lost when it's one person on a giant stage with a turntable. There are only a few big set pieces surrounding the battle, and they work just as effectively if you zoom in on the action. This particular production took over the whole stage as the barricade by lowering a scaffold down. Everybody climbed on it and the shots from the enemy were just flashes of light from the walls of the theatre. It worked better, in my opinion, because the giant! fancy! stage! of traditional productions makes a promise for the battle that the actual action doesn't fulfill. In fact, this production was so much better than any traditional production I've seen that only the Act I finale is even comparable between the two forms in terms of dramatic power. I think the music also loses some of its dated pop sound when the actors don't have to belt everything, although, as I said, I love the music anyway so I'm not the most reliable witness! Supposedly only a few of these small-stage productions are being licensed, but if you get a chance to see it, I'd give it a go; you might be surprised how much the show changes, freed from the dated spectacle that made the original so popular in its day.