Spamalot: What a legend: Monty Python's Arthur is on a musical quest

A classic musical adaptation of a treasured comedy film will continue to delight Hexagon visitors – 43 years from the release of its original inspiration.

Spamalot, which is adapted from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is packed with silly songs and entertaining characters.

John Du Prez is the composer of Spamalot’s music and came up with the idea for the production with Python Eric Idle.

“My first thought was that it was a great title,” John said.

“We originally started collaborating when he invited me along to see him playing Ko-Ko in The Mikado.

“Every night, he would rewrite the lyrics to the ‘Little List’ number to make it topical and he thought that if he was doing all that for someone else, we might as well have a go at doing something similar for ourselves.

“At the time I was writing things that would never get produced for no money so we came up with the idea of performing the Monty Python music.

“No one had ever done it before. We rounded up all the big hits and put on a performance at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“It worked so well we took the show on a 30-city tour of America playing all this Python music.

“The audiences absolutely loved it.

“With Spamalot, we wrote it in three weeks, recorded it in three weeks and then it took three years to get it into production.

“So we did another 30-city tour in the meantime.

“When it finally got off the ground, the lottery people, Camelot, said ‘You can’t call it Spamalot’.”

The production ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2009, being played 1,575 times.

John said of the scenes that keep making him laugh: “The Song That Goes Like This is a send-up of all those huge Broadway musical numbers, in particular the big love song in Phantom of the Opera when a chandelier crashes down at the end of it. In Spamalot the chandelier explodes at the climax of the song and I find it funny every time.”o