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Stage

'Spamalot' not a stretch for Shakespearean actor

"A lot of Shakespeare is faintly absurd," says Michael Siberry, who portrays King Arthur in the musical's current tour. The show opens Tuesday for a two-week run in Tampa.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published January 21, 2007

Michael Siberry grew up in Tasmania, which is "about as far away as you can get," he says of his Australian island homeland, but even there Monty Python's Flying Circus was all the rage in the 1970s.

"I was a schoolboy, and it was the big thing on television, completely new and original," Siberry says. "You never quite understood what was going on, but the fact that it was completely unpredictable and totally surreal made it riveting. Nowadays, it's the kind of humor, 30 years on, that everybody gets. At the time, it was definitely the thing to watch."

Siberry went on to emigrate to England and become a distinguished actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the United States, he starred in high-profile productions of Nicholas Nickleby and Uncle Vanya.

But now for something completely different: Siberry, 50, is playing King Arthur in the tour of Monty Python's Spamalot, the Tony Award-winning musical that opens a two-week run Tuesday in Tampa.

"It's great fun to be performing something you used to take back the next morning at school and talk about and perform with your mates," he says from a tour stop in Fort Lauderdale. "Now to be doing it in middle age is kind of wild."

The Broadway production of Spamalot, adapted or "lovingly ripped off," as the playbill puts it from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, brought together a pair of comic geniuses in Eric Idle, a mainstay of the original Python crew, who wrote the book, lyrics and music (with composer and longtime collaborator John Du Prez), and director Mike Nichols. It won the 2005 Tony for best musical, and Nichols won for best director.

Idle and Nichols worked closely with the cast when the tour got underway last March in Boston. What advice did they give Siberry about his performance? "Just not to take it too seriously, and not to think you're funnier than your material," he says.

Tim Curry originated Arthur on Broadway, then repeated the role in London. Siberry says Curry will do it again in the 90-minute Spamalot planned to open this year at Wynn Las Vegas.

Asked if he imagines his performance is much different from that of Curry or other Arthurs (Graham Chapman played the role in the movie), Siberry says, "Yeah, I am, and they (Idle and Nichols) sort of encourage that, as long as you're accessible to the audience and make them laugh. Everyone who does it has their own take on the role. They want you very much to bring your own character to it."

Siberry doesn't see Python humor as too great a stretch from the comic roles in Shakespeare he has played, such as the jester Touchstone in As You Like It or even the tragic-comic fraud Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well.

"A lot of Shakespeare is faintly absurd. Classical theater often borders on the farcical," he says.

Siberry didn't study up on Arthurian lore and legend for the show, but he is not unaware of it.

"I worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company with a wonderful old director named John Barton, and his great passion was Le Morte d'Arthur, the original Middle English poem," he says. "He read it to us one day - in Middle English - and it went on for hours. I always remember that, and it's strange to be playing King Arthur in the Monty Python context, but there's some spillover. It is loosely based on the Arthurian story. They're all kind of classics scholars - the Monty Python group - so they have fairly extensive knowledge of those legends."

Siberry has done a few musicals before. He played Von Trapp in a Broadway revival of The Sound of Music. In London's West End, he was Billy Flynn in Chicago. He played Shakespeare in Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs at New York's Lincoln Center.

His favorite numbers in Spamalot are the title spoof of Camelot and Find Your Grail. In some ways, he says, the unsung hero of the show is composer Du Prez.

"John's got an amazing grasp of all styles of music, and he can incorporate them into anything. I think in our overture we have a little Wagner creeping in."

Marketers for Spamalot have attempted to counter conventional wisdom that Monty Python humor appeals more to men than women. They have run ads of a knight with a bouquet and copy reading, "Pythons are a girl's best friend."

"It's not particularly male-oriented, I don't think," Siberry says. "The great thing is that it appeals to people who don't necessarily even go to the theater or don't like musicals. It's a great takeoff of musical theater. There's something for everyone there."

There's even a hilarious parody of a program for a Finnish musical in the playbill written by Python stalwart Michael Palin.

By now the Python style of humor - once so offbeat and even avant-garde in an English schoolboy sort of way - is universally understood.

"Comedy in England has moved on a lot since Python," Siberry says, mentioning a BBC sketch show called Little Britain as the latest thing. "It's pretty out there. It's more surreal, edgier."

Siberry recently signed on for six more months with the tour. He has been enjoying seeing America. "I work in New York and occasionally in L.A., but I've never really done the rest of the country," he says.

Besides, playing Arthur is not exactly heavy lifting. "Spamalot is a very easy show to sustain because we do at least a couple weeks everywhere we play and the material is so much fun," Siberry says. "Plus I'm the only person in the show who doesn't change costumes, so I'm very fortunate in that sense."

PREVIEW

Spamalot

Spamalot opens at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and runs through Feb. 4 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $44.75-$80.75. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org.

[Last modified January 18, 2007, 12:35:31]