“Mike was going on again about the perfidious people who keep theatrical diaries,” Eric Idle writes about Mike Nichols in his own theatrical diary, meticulously dated October 20, 2004 at 10:22 pm. Nichols, Idle’s long-time friend, was the director Idle had picked to oversee his adaptation of the 1975 movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” into the 2005 Broadway musical “Spamalot.”
“I didn’t fess up.” Idle says about his being one of those perfidious people. “Should I? I don’t think so. It’s not like I’m intending to publish it.”
That wasn’t a lie twenty years ago, Idle tells us in a brief introduction to the newly published “The Spamalot Diaries” (Crown, 208 pages), which chronicles Idle’s sometimes hilarious take on the roughly 14-month journey from first read-through to Chicago try-out to Broadway opening night to the Tony Awards, where “Spamalot” won Best Musical.
Idle claims not to have remembered he even kept a diary, only rediscovering it recently amidst his accumulated hoard of guitars, books and Beanie Babies while selling his large old house in the Hollywood Hills and moving to a much smaller place, a process he called Downsize Abbey.
In the introduction, he says he decided to have his old diary published now because of the reaction to it by his wife and a few friends. But there is an additional possible reason suggested in some of his recent social media posts. At 81, Idle could use the money: “I don’t know why people always assume we’re loaded. Python is a disaster. Spamalot made money 20 years ago. I have to work for my living.”
This would help explain why (in a possible rush to publication and payday), the journal entries and email exchanges reprinted in “The Spamalot Diaries” are presented with little apparent editing, an afterword even briefer than the introduction, and just three footnotes; one notes that Spamalot star Sara Ramirez now goes by “they,” another that Nichols coined the term Ratfuck “for any large organized black-tie event.”
Left largely unexplained are copious references to songs and scenes in the movie and in (or considered for) the musical – long, exasperating arguments about “the cow song” and “the whole burning-a-witch thing” and the “killer rabbit drop” – that one would need to have assiduously studied the movie and the musical in order to understand. I suspect this will not be a problem for many readers, judging from a remark early in rehearsals made to Idle by Hank Azaria, who was making his Broadway debut. Idle expressed surprise that Azaria had already memorized his lines for his role as the French Taunter. Azaria explained: “I have been doing it since I was fifteen.”
Idle was one of the six Brits who in 1969 founded the comedy troupe Monty Python, who became wildly popular in the 1970s and early 80s first for their sketch comedy TV series, then for their five films, before going on to successful individual careers. While “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was a group effort, the main involvement of the other Pythons in “Spamalot” was having “consented” to take one-third of the artistic royalties (“the norm is 25 percent.”) “The others would not have helped. They have done everything they needed to do to make it work, including staying out of the way.”
If there is a hint of snark in Idle’s comments about the other Pythons, this is not a mean-spirited or tell-all book. There are some passages criticizing a couple of actors by name (one Nichols fired; the other he almost did.) But even here the nearly-fired one is the subject of the third footnote – how he “learns from Mike and becomes an important and supportive member of the Company.” The book is mostly marked by Idle’s great enthusiasm for the show’s cast and creative team, such as Casey Nicholaw, making his Broadway debut as a choreographer after a career as a dancer, and Sara Ramirez. Indeed, his praise for Ramirez’s (Tony-winning) performance as The Lady of the Lake is so persistent, elaborate, lovingly over-the-top (“a new Streisand… a total display of bravura superstar power”) that it engenders in the reader a palpable sense of regret that the theater community lost Ramirez long ago to series television.
“The Spamalot Diaries” is dedicated to Mike Nichols, and if Idle clearly worships the man, the advantage of the diary form is that it subtly presents an arc in their relationship that’s not evident with any of the other people he writes about. At first, Idle reacts to Nichols’ dictates with a distancing humor, even a hint of ridicule, that turns at times into outright annoyance –
“Mike warns we may only have two fart jokes in any one production…”
“Mike told me he was happy because he had finally discovered that the play was about something. ‘It is about the English obsession with class’ This was very important to him. Everything must have meaning….”
“Mike.. has never experienced this, someone so resistant to his ideas, even when he wrote with Elaine May… ‘You and me have been friends for a long time,’ he says, ‘but I don’t see how I can go on.’ I don’t back down.”
They make up, and while they continue to have arguments, Idle takes to quoting Nichols as if wisdom from the master: “He often refers to his pal Stephen, who is, naturally, Sondheim whom he has known for forty-six years. ‘Who knew he was the Mozart,’ he says, ‘while Lenny [Bernstein] was only the Salieri?’”
Mike “rather scarily began to talk about Gower Champion and the perfect way he died on the opening night of his show, thereby ensuring it was a hit. I said the price was too high. Couldn’t he just get sick a little? Mike laughed heartily, but I must have jinxed him because he is now sick and was coughing all night….”
As befits a diary, Idle indulges in randomness — accounts of dinner parties and after parties with fellow celebrities, a few rants (he is “irate” that he had to fly coach rather than first class to Chicago), an amusing account of a trip to Las Vegas (scoping out a future venue for the musical), lyrics of songs that were cut, concerns about his family, expressions of guilt about abandoning his wife and daughter to hole up for all-nighters in a hotel room to work on his umpteenth draft. Along the way, we do pick up some information about what it took to turn a movie that cost $400,000 with ninety-eight speaking roles into a Broadway musical costing $13 million (“our lawyers cost more than the original movie.”) When Nichols insists on toning a scene down, calling it becoming “too high school,” Idle writes to himself: “What’s wrong with a nice laugh? Python never despised that. Is it the Broadway cringe? They are all scared of someone at the Times, whom they affect to despise but whom they quote all the time.”
The paragraph-long Afterword takes us to the opening of the Broadway revival of “Spamalot” in 2023. Unmentioned: The revival closed after less than five months; the original ran almost four years.
I found that much of the musical held up, but that there were moments that I felt hadn’t aged well. One of them was “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway,” an elaborate song-and-dance that begins when Robin tells King Arthur the “news” that a show can’t succeed on Broadway “if we don’t have any Jews.” Given the surge in antisemitism (this was a month after the October 7th massacre in Israel), I simply didn’t enjoy what in the diary we learn Nichols called the Jew number, which involves a Fiddler on the Roof parody, a huge Star of David, a Barbra Streisand impersonator….the works.
So it was striking that in the diary Eric Idle calls it “the finest moment in the show for me” and instructive to read the account of the initial audience reaction, and of how Idle (who is not Jewish) came up with the number:
“They shriek with laughter, which is followed by an instant moment of anxiety, when they wonder, “Oh my God, which way is this going?” but then a moment later they see in a flash that it is all right. It is the very opposite of a Nazi moment, so that they scream with joy.
“Something is being said which is very rarely admitted which is both literally true and politically incorrect: You won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews. It came from something Lorne Michaels said to me a long time ago. ‘We are the leaven that makes the bread rise.’ I loved that, and somehow my subconscious turned it into that song.”
Such passages made me wonder whether “The Spamalot Diaries” might have benefited had Idle taken advantage of the twenty-year delay in publication to offer any new perspective, in footnotes or a real afterword. As is, I’m not sure why the title is in plural.
“The Spamalot Diaries” is not a strong vehicle for introspection, then, nor a how-to manual. But it brings us back to a show biz tale of success with some wit and charm, and even a brief moment or two of loveliness. At opening night in 2005, Idle was called to the stage:
“Urged to speak I said, ‘I really must ask up a group from Britain without whom we wouldn’t all be here today: John … er Paul, George, and Ringo,’ which got a good laugh and then I pulled up the Pythons, who apparently all made obeisance behind me, which I never saw because I was looking at my daughter’s face on the front row…”
