There is something to be said about “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Something, but not everything.

The day after we saw Richard II at Stratford, we went to see a matinee of Spamalot. Talk about a tonal shift.

Spamalot is a basically a musical version of the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” with some snippets from “Life of Brian” thrown in there. There are some plot changes, sure, but that’s the gist of it. It’s big, it’s British, it’s slapstick, and it’s got a bunch of well-known one-liners.

I was fairly familiar with Spamalot going in – I’ve seen the Monty Python movies and I’ve heard some of the songs from the show before. Notably, an “Always Look on the Brightside” 30-second advertisement played in the back of every New York City cab for what seemed like forever. But I’d never seen it performed live, so I was excited.

Look…it’s a fun show. I laughed a lot. My mouth hurt from smiling so much. And if you go, you will enjoy it, as it’s hard not to. The jokes land, the dancers are working their BUTTS off in this show, and the singers are good. But I have to be honest, I don’t have a lot to say.

The talent in the production is, on the whole, strong. I was especially impressed with Jennifer Rider-Shaw as Lady of the Lake and the fact that she did the entire show 6 or 7 months pregnant. She is a force. I also liked Liam Tobin’s performance as Galahad. His comedic timing was a bit tighter than some of the other performers.

The Stratford production seems to be a faithful recreation of the original show, from what I could gather from watching “slime tutorials” of the Broadway production (that’s theatre kid code for unofficial recordings). The costumes look similar, the sight-gags are the same. But the thing is…Stratford is not Broadway. Yes, the production quality is high. But the shows don’t have a Broadway budget, plain and simple. For a show that has a lot of flash and glitz and glam, if you try to recreate it in its entirety, it may feel like some oomph is missing.

I recognize this is super niche criticism, and the vast majority of people watching this show probably wouldn’t notice. But I would rather see some new choices that better suit the scale of the production than try to recreate well-known IP but only get 80% of the way there.

There’s one number from the show that’s worth discussing, though. There’s a song in the second act about what it takes to produce a successful show, and the punchline (sorry to spoil) is that you won’t be successful on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews. This song was cut from the West End production, but not on Broadway or in Stratford’s production.

And I felt like the audience didn’t really know how to react to this song. They were laughing, but…hesitantly? As if they were unsure if it was ok to laugh.

Disclosure: I’m Jewish. And I think this song is totally fine. The fact is, there ARE lots of Jewish producers and creatives working on Broadway. The song doesn’t feed into any stereotypes about Jews, and it doesn’t feel like it is laughing at Jews instead of with. And it’s funny. I think there are other slightly racially insensitive hills to die on.

I have a theory, though, that this song may land differently when you’re performing it in New York City to an audience that likely has many more Jews. In Stratford, I just don’t think it’s the same demographic makeup. Regardless, Jewish or not, I think it’s ok to laugh during this song, and I think you’ll like this show.

Spamalot is playing at the Avon Theatre in Stratford until October 28. You can grab tickets here.

Featured image: Stratford Festival, photo by David Hou. From top to bottom: Aaron Krohn, Anthony MacPherson, Jason Sermonia, McKinley Knuckle.