Thursday, May 18, 2006
Parental Control
So I saw Spamalot the other night. It was definitely a really enjoyable show -- pretty much every song involved jazz hands at some point and they covered the stage in shiny, flashing stuff for a good portion of the evening. The characters were somewhat interchangeable and the plot was not so exceedingly plotty, but who really cares when there's confetti? Plus when I got up the next morning the cast was on WGN, which made me feel like I was way ahead of the curve on this one, even though it opened, what, a couple of years ago? I'm such a trendsetter.
I have to say I was surprised by how much I actually remembered of the movie on which Spamalot is based. When I was a kid my parents made us watch all kinds of Monty Python, in keeping with their general strategy of exposing their children to wholly inappropriate things. For instance, they thought it was a fine idea to take a five-year-old to a Woody Allen film festival, assuming, I guess, that Manhattan and The Muppets Take Manhattan were more or less the same thing. To this day I still have an inappropriate tendency towards psychiatrist jokes and underaged Asians. They also thought Eddie Murphy's Raw made fine family viewing, which led to some interesting conversations with my grandmother. But some programming was barred, based solely on its perceived lack of quality. Deeming Saved By the Bell juvenile and A Different World preachy, my parents (unsuccessfully) shut these sitcoms out of our home.
And yet I still ended up sleeping in my parents' room for a week because Young Sherlock Holmes freaked me out so bad. Egyptians WERE going to kidnap me and turn me into a mummy, I swear!
So I saw Spamalot the other night. It was definitely a really enjoyable show -- pretty much every song involved jazz hands at some point and they covered the stage in shiny, flashing stuff for a good portion of the evening. The characters were somewhat interchangeable and the plot was not so exceedingly plotty, but who really cares when there's confetti? Plus when I got up the next morning the cast was on WGN, which made me feel like I was way ahead of the curve on this one, even though it opened, what, a couple of years ago? I'm such a trendsetter.
I have to say I was surprised by how much I actually remembered of the movie on which Spamalot is based. When I was a kid my parents made us watch all kinds of Monty Python, in keeping with their general strategy of exposing their children to wholly inappropriate things. For instance, they thought it was a fine idea to take a five-year-old to a Woody Allen film festival, assuming, I guess, that Manhattan and The Muppets Take Manhattan were more or less the same thing. To this day I still have an inappropriate tendency towards psychiatrist jokes and underaged Asians. They also thought Eddie Murphy's Raw made fine family viewing, which led to some interesting conversations with my grandmother. But some programming was barred, based solely on its perceived lack of quality. Deeming Saved By the Bell juvenile and A Different World preachy, my parents (unsuccessfully) shut these sitcoms out of our home.
And yet I still ended up sleeping in my parents' room for a week because Young Sherlock Holmes freaked me out so bad. Egyptians WERE going to kidnap me and turn me into a mummy, I swear!
