Lemmy Kilmister and The Holy Grail

Monday night we went to see Spamalot on Broadway, a gift from Kimberly for my birthday. I've never laughed so hard at a play before, and had a ball.

For the most part, I've come to really hate musicals. For the life of me, I can't understand the appeal of songs that are really just mundane conversation set to music:

"Are you going to the park?"
"I am going to the park!"
"He is going to the park! To the park! To the park!"

Ay yi yi.

However, Spamalot was much more witty and clever and fun than anything I've seen on stage before. Tim Curry is an awesome King, David Hyde Pierce was hilarious in a scene that paid homage to Fiddler On The Roof, and Hank Azaria was fantastic as several characters, including the my favorite carryover from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie, "The French Taunter". Any production that mocks both The French and Andrew Lloyd Webber is A-OK in my book.

The pre-sale on this show was pretty huge, and I'm sure once more people actually see it and the word gets out further, tickets will be even tougher to find. As they say on the West End, "book now".

On the other end of the sonic scale, last night I went with Ron and his pal Jose to see Motörhead, at the Starland Ballroom in fabulous Sayreville, New Jersey. Since the Birch Hill Night Club, the dive-iest Jersey rock dive ever closed in late 2003, the Starland has become HQ for Central Jersey's rockers. For this show, the place looked like a giant sociology project. As Sayreville (original home of Bon Jovi) is located smack dab in Kevin Smith land, the crowd looked like a giant casting call for the Clerks sequel (especially heavy on the Jay's, Silent Bob's, and Berserker's).



As always, Motörhead killed. Despite this being the first show on the tour, and drummer Mickey Dee's stomach ailment (which lent a Spinal Tap-ish feel to the show everytime he lept up from his kit to puke behind the Marshall cabinets), the set was great, loud, and tight. Jose, a metal fan from Spain so hardcore that he's planning a trip to Germany later this year to witness an Accept reunion show, claimed it was among his favorite shows ever. Ron, who last saw Motörhead play in the early Nineties at a tiny Comedy Central press party on Bleeker Street for the fledgling network's short-lived running of The Young Ones, told me his car radio was sounding distorted this morning, so he's still feeling the effects. I woke up feeling like a train hit me, but somehow it's a good feeling. As you can see by the pictures, we were plenty close to the action.




"Everything Louder Than Everything Else", indeed.