Spamapoop, or How the Grinder is Making Taco Meat of Our Culture

Get ready for another tantrum. From playbill.com:

Producer Jeff Gardner has secured the rights to the 1993 hit movie "Grumpy Old Men" and hopes to turn the property into a stage musical and bring it to Broadway in spring 2008, Variety reported. ... Other titles on their way to Broadway include "Legally Blonde," "Moonstruck," "Ball of Fire," "The Wedding Singer," "Heartbreakers," "Those Lips, Those Eyes," "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Mermaids."

This goes back to a previous entry about The Lord of the Rings musical. There's this grinder, you see, and it is a big machine that recycles ideas over and over, through each art form, for maximum profit. Think of The Producers, which was first a movie (a great one), then a musical (an average one), and will next be a movie musical (the trend, as well as rumors of on-set fritziness, could mean it sucks). Soon, we will get a musical based on the movie musical, then a movie based on the movie musical musical.

And just as I type this, Playbill reports that Sunset Boulevard is being made into a movie. "But it already is a movie!" you cry. Yes, but this is a film adaptation of the stage adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Weber starring Glenn Close. Now Close and Ewan MacGregor will be starring in the movie of the musical of the movie and oh my God I'm cross-eyed.

I ask why. I saw Spamalot in April, and it sucked. Bad. And I love Monty Python. The Holy Grail is British humor at its best and most unstoppable. But when you Xerox its appeal, stuff it with bad songs, and process it for the stage, it becomes, well, spam. The prime rib has been ground into chuck. This is obviously my problem; the rest of the audience at the Shubert Theatre was roaring. But I felt like the producers made me pay $100 to watch a live version of the damn movie with second-rate performers, without granting a discount for having to sit through the pitiful songs.

When Spamalot is made into a movie, you'll know where to find me. I'll be at home, under my desk, with a rosary, praying for the eschaton.


Oh yeah, this should make for some riveting theatre.