The precise trajectory of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a deeply strange and bewildering one. The 1975 comedy made a few million dollars at the box office. In the years that followed, it grew to become immensely popular on home video. It was a cult classic that was alarmingly quotable across a number of subcultures in the decades that followed. Some three decades after the release of that original film, Holy Grail co-writer/co-star Eric Idle took notice adapted the film into a hit stage musical. Now fans of the movie could lip synch to professional stage actors speaking lines from a movie they’d already seen a million times and quoted to each other tens of millions of times.
A decade has passed since that original production was brought to stage. (The movie is now 40 years old.) Now smaller regional theatre company stagings are beginning to emerge with casts that likely include some of those fans of the original film who have been quoting it to each other all these years, The fans take the stage again and once more they reclaim something that may only ever truly have belonged to them to begin with. They’ll be performing it for other fans. And so continues the long, strange circle of life for a cult classic comedy.
The latest local manifestation of Monty Python’s Spamalot surfaces this month courtesy of Racine Theatre Guild. Racine Theatre Guild’s Managing and Artistic Director Doug Instenes directs the production. Gregory Berg is music director and Kara Ernst-Schalk is choreographer.
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Racine Theatre Guild’s production of Monty Python’s Spamalot runs May 15-31. For more information, visit racinetheatre.org.
