The middle of next month will feature a tribute to Monty Python courtesy of a group referring to itself as The Brew City Bombshafts.
From the Facebook Announcement:
"And now for something completely different...
From The Flying Circus to The Meaning of Life...
The Brew City Bombshafts present:
The Full Monty Python!!!
SUDDEN, VIOLENT COMEDY. And naughty bits.
No Llamas. Well, not many, anyway.
And there was much rejoicing!"
What is it? Well . . . could be a lot of things. In a post on the Facebook event announcement, Michael Guthrie refers to: "A pregnant nun singing 'Every Sperm Is Sacred'... Insults... Marriage Counseling... Spam... a number called 'Dance Of The Pepperpots'... I might suggest that this will be - at the very least - a spectacle of some sort."
So what we're looking at here is locals performing old Python comedy bits. Think of it as a cover band . . . only they're doing sketch comedy instead of songs. Here's a bit of surveillance camera-style footage of the group from its debut performance.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/R2ZWLKztuyM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So you have some idea of what you're in for if you go . . .
The Full Monty Python runs June 14th - 16th at The Milwaukee Fortress on 100 A. East Pleasant Street. All shows start at 10 pm. Tickets are $12 at the door or $10 with a non-perishable food item.
Personally Parenthetical:
(This one feels a bit strange for me . . . I remember being really, really into Python in Junior High School. I recently went back and watched every episode of the Flying Circus show a few months back. Oddly, it was kind of disappointing. Monty Python did a better job with timing and delivery on the audio recordings than they did for television . . . but more than that, the material's not as good as I remember it being.
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Monty Python's Flying Circus was part of a large movement towards the experimental that flitted through the popular arts in the late '60s/early '70s. (Warhol's a, A novel, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Beatles' Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and so on...) The Flying Circus was just the TV end of the spirit of that age . . . and like so much experimentation, so little of it holds up over the years.
Much of what the cult of Python has held onto feels pleasantly silly in an experimental way but without much substance. The Parrot Sketch and Spam and the Lumberjack song are fun, but . . . some of the best stuff isn't generally recognized by the cult. Some of it still feels remarkably fresh, but it doesn't have instant recognition. The Mouse Problem was a brilliant piece by Chapman that played-up the casual brutality of anti-gay sentiment . . . on television in 1969 no less. Intentionally or not, there was a sketch from the twelfth episode of the first season that anticipated the vacuousness of modern news programs. Spectrum--Talking About Things was a clever little bit that featured a surprisingly in-depth news sketch that actually didn't reference anything at all . . . it feels very much like an early '70s British version of anything seen on the contemporary 24-hour news networks. It sounds like they're being terribly clever, but nothing's actually being said. There are a few insanely clever bits in the Python's work like Spectrum and The Mouse Problem, but they seem to have been lost amidst the troupe's more quotable, less substantial pieces. )
