Among the comedic greats perched atop the pinnacle of British comedy is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). The film employs classic dry British humour to tell the slapstick story of King Arthur and his inept Knights of the Round Table as they embark on a quest to find the Holy Grail, chucking holy hand grenades at killer bunnies and inflicting only minor flesh wounds. Presented by Broadway in Victoria, Spamalot is a musical-theatre production borrowing heavily from that film. Actor Chris Collins-Pisano plays several iconic roles within the production, including Lancelot, the French Taunter, and Tim the Enchanter.
“Spamalot is a pretty topsy-turvy take on the whole Arthurian myth, legend, and lore, lovingly ripped off from the movie,” he says. “We’ve got a beautiful mix of sketch comedy and really, really silly toilet humour mixed with highbrow comedy, but then we’ve also got this huge spectacle Broadway show going on, with amazing choreography.”
Collins-Pisano says that, as a fan of the original work, his priorities in the show lie in faithfully recreating the source material rather than taking artistic license to retell it.
“This has been a favourite musical of mine since I was a kid. I’ve been a huge Monty Python fan for a long time, so when I got the audition, I was really psyched about it, and it’s been a blast,” he says. “With something so iconic like this, I feel like I don’t really have a problem with doing a little bit of highway robbery, honestly. So getting to use as a baseline everything that John Cleese did in the movie… is pretty important to me. Because it’s just too good.”
Fans also have nostalgia going into the show, says Collins-Pisano, and what they’re looking for is the lines and set pieces that they fell in love with.
“There really is some level of expectation from the audience,” he says. “The movie’s been around for 50 years; the musical has been around for over 20 now, so, you know, people kind of have an idea of what the show is going to be.”
The process of adapting a movie to a stage play does still provide some opportunity for creativity, says Collins-Pisano, because the medium is different.
“I definitely am putting my own spin on it. It’s cool to adapt something that everybody knows from a movie, to take it to the stage, because you get to embody the script a little bit more, because you can’t use close-ups and stuff like that,” he says. “You have to communicate a little differently sometimes.”
The wide variety of accents (including British, Scottish, and French) are fun for Collins-Pisano, because he gets to either take them very seriously or ham them up to his heart’s content.
“I’m definitely trying to nail the accents, I think it’s such an important part of this style of humour to treat it as seriously as you can,” he says. “I think the only one that I kind of have fun with is the French Taunter, but I’m basing that accent on what John Cleese created in the movie. So when people ask about the French dialect, I’m like, I don’t do a good French accent. I do a really, really bad one… on purpose.”
Collins-Pisano says that Spamalot is a fun, family, feel-good sort of show, with a little something for everybody.
“I think it’s the kind of show that you’re going to walk out feeling better than when you walk in,” he says. “There’s so many different jokes, with so many different levels of sophistication, that it’s got something for all different ages. It’s a great escape, and it’s super fun.”
Spamalot
Various times, Friday, August 28 to Sunday, August 30
Various prices, Royal Theatre
rmts.bc.ca