Spamalot!
Jul 28th, 2008 by Antoinette
Three shows in London, in the order of: emotional (LOTR), entertaining (Joseph) and on our last night: Spamalot (hilarious!). Monty Python at its best. We both never laughed so much in a theater, at one point tears were rolling down our faces. From laughter, mind you!
Catching songs and the audience joined in whistling at Always look at the bright side of life. Inge (my SIL) is a huge fan of Sanjeev Bhaskar and it was great seeing him on stage. No, he isn’t a professional singer, but his voice is good enough. He’s famous for his comical talent, and the role of King Arthur gives him every opportunity to show it.
We went to the stage-door after the show, and were surprised that we were the only two fans there. Amazing! When Sanjeev came out, he seemed genuinely pleased that we were waiting for him. He signed my program and I took a pic, that made him look at me and say (pointing at Inge) “shouldn’t she be in the picture?”. But no, Inge hates having her picture taken. “So do I”, he said, “but it comes with the job”. Inge asked him what he preferred: TV or stage. “Oh this”, he said without thinking, “it’s such an amazing show to be in and such a wonderful cast. But it’s not my profession of course, I’m not a singer, nor a dancer and there are so many people on stage far better than I am”. I told him that it seemed such a hard task, acting, singing, moving elegantly, dancing, keeping in mind the rest of the cast and where you are on stage… “Well”, he said with a smile, “I’m on that stage doing just that, and anything I can do, you can do” “better”, I replied, twisting the title of the famous song. “Oh I bet you can do some things better, talking Dutch for instance. Come on, teach me something in Dutch”. So I said: “Goedenavond” and he pronounced it perfectly, figured out it means Good Evening. Then Inge grabbed her chance and said: “Ik hou van jou”, again he repeated it in perfect Dutch. I had to laugh and he looked at me and said… “hm, seeing your reaction, I wonder what it was I said”. We told him it meant I love you and he said: “Yeah, thought it might mean something like that, I’d narrowed it down to two.”
We talked some more and when he left Inge said: “My regards to your wife”, and again he seemed genuinely grateful. Such a nice and friendly man.
I wanted to wait some more to see if I could get an autograph from Michael Xavier, who plays Galahad. He came out texting someone (later into the conversation he told us he was texting Lee Mead *smiles*) and he as well took the time to talk to us about the show and asked lots of questions. It was more of a conversation than I ever had at any stage door, it’s usually more like: hello.., signing program.., posing for pic.., bye.
We tried to teach him some Dutch as well, and he wasn’t bad. but Sanjeev’s pronunciation was much better, Michael had trouble with the hard “g”.
He suggested to take a pic in front of the Spamalot poster and although I HATE having my pic taken (I think I’m at 1 pic in 10 years time) I said okay, and joined him, and while we posed Michael was joking around. We didn’t want to keep him any longer as he was meeting friends in a pub, so we said our goodbyes and went back to the hotel. With intervals we quoted lines from the show and were ROFL every time. Never mind what people thought, we had a blast!
