Arts & Entertainment

Bill Carroll
Special to the Jewish News

A

French knights call

to mind the Marx

Brothers in a scene
from Monty Python's

Sparnalot

nd on the seventh day (Monday), the theater was dark;
and the cast of Monty Python's Spamalot rested; and the
two Jewish cast members went to shul for Yom Kippur.
It sounds a bit unusual, just like the Tony Award-winning musical
show itself, but it happened when the Spamalot road tour played in
Cleveland. Kevin Crewell, Sir Lancelot's understudy, and Jamie Karen
(Goldberg) — she just uses her first two names — understudy for
the Lady of the Lake character, attended services at a synagogue in
Cleveland's eastern suburbs.
"We loved the peace and quiet of the beautiful service because
our show is pretty hectic," says Karen. "It's important for us to keep
practicing Judaism wherever we are."
Reconnecting with their Judaism could happen again for the
actors when the tour comes to Detroit for a four-week run, Dec. 12-
Jan. 6, at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit. Chanukah begins at sundown
on Dec. 15, and Crewell and Karen are looking forward to celebrat-
ing the holiday in the Detroit area.
Spamalot is a product of Monty Python, the internationally
famous, mostly British comedy team of actors and writers that
starred in Monty Python's Flying Circus, a show that ran from 1969-
1974 on the BBC. The musical is "lovingly ripped off" from the
team's most popular full-length movie, 1975's Monty Python and
the Holy Grail, with a screenplay by Monty Python creators Graham
Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and
Michael Palin. Idle wrote the book and lyrics for the musical and co-
wrote the music with John Du Prez.
Hormel Foods loves Spamalot because the show's name is boost-
ing sales of Spam, the company's famous canned spiced ham. But
the Spamalot name actually is derived from a line in Holy Grail: "We
eat a lot of ham, jam and Spam a lot."

Knights Of Fun on page 58