The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
‘Spamilton’ at its best, funniest when it’s ‘Hamilton’-focused
Enjoyable parody spends too much energy lampooning Broadway scene as a whole
“Spamilton: An American Parody” is, on its largely funny face, a parody of Broadway juggernaut “Hamilton: An American Musical.”
And for a decent chunk of its roughly 80 minutes, “Forbidden Broadway” mastermind Gerard Alessandrini’s 2016 work is just that — a very clever skewering of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hiphop-powered biographical tale of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
It is very timely, taking up residency at Playhouse Square’s Hanna Theatre only a few months removed from the spectacular touring production of “Hamilton”
that spent several weeks wowing audiences at the Cleveland complex’s much larger State Theatre.
When “Spamilton” is playfully jabbing at “Hamilton,” it is both hilarious and impressive. Consider tone-setting opening number “Lin-Manuel as Hamilton,” a nearly beat-for-beat riff on “Hamilton” opener “Alexander Hamilton.” Instead of a biographical sketch of Hamilton, we get one of Miranda, Alessandrini painting the writer as someone both dying to inject new life into Broadway — “He saw ‘Little Mermaid’/It made him think of suicide” — and an artist who channeled his inspiration into hard work — “His first hurricane came, and ‘In the Heights’ the name/Our man wrote his future hit sitting on a train/Put a pencil to his temple and stuck it into his brain/And he wrote his first refrain while hollering out in pain.”
(That number also offers the almost-obligatory selfdeprecation of a spoof show, making reference to its miniscule production budget and ultimate purpose: “There’s a dozen songs we haven’t trashed/But just you wait.”)
And “Spamilton” finishes really strongly, with the cast members performing “The Film When it Happens,” a tons-of-fun tweak of “The Room Where It Happens” in which “Hamilton” actors fret about the possibility they won’t be asked to be in an inevitable movie adaptation.
In between those numbers, after Lin-Manuel (Adrian Lopez) sings early on about how he is “not going
to let Broadway rot,” “Spamilton” is mostly interested in slamming the current state of big-time theater. Alessandrini clearly sees Broadway — and with reason — as a largely uninspired scene, albeit one that is very profitable these days thanks largely to Disney shows (hence the aforementioned “Little Mermaid” line) and other adaptations of familiar properties that are anything but daring.
The crowd that filled most-to-all the seats at the Hanna for a performance on Dec. 27 seemed very engaged with all “Spamilton”
had to offer, giving it myriad enthusiastic responses. Still, so much of its theater-related humor appears designed mainly for an off-Broadway audience in a venue a cab ride from America’s theater capital.
As “Spamilton” feels less and less concerned with “Hamilton” and more with packing in appearances by folks ranging from actresses Bernadette Peters and Barbra Streisand to characters Harry Potter and Annie, it also feels less special. Plenty of other shows have had its fun at Broadway’s expense, including
Alessandrini’s “Forbidden Broadway” revues and “Something Rotten,” a terrific show that visited Playhouse Square in 2017.
Not that a lot of the theater gags in “Spamilton” aren’t fun, of course. For instance, you can’t help but laugh when the show lets “The Book of Mormon” have it, snarkily reminding the creation by “South Park” showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone that it was a big deal BEFORE “Hamilton” came along to rule the musical-theater world.
The cast of the “Spamilton”
tour — which is launching with this Cleveland run — is solid if not spectacular. For the most part, the stage is taken up by five regulars — Chuckie Benson, Ani Djirdjirian, Dominic Pecikonis, Datus Puryear — although Brandon Kinley makes the most of limited of his stage time as the King in the hilarious “Straight Is Back.” Djirdjirian stands out a bit because she’s the lone woman among a handful of men for several scenes, but also because she’s talented. And Pecikonis offers an enjoyable portrayal of Daveed
Diggs, the original “Hamilton” Thomas Jefferson, especially during “Daveed Diggs - The Fresh Prince of Big Hair.”
The energy by the performers on the stage is matched to the left of it by Curtis Reynolds on the piano providing the show’s musical backbone.
You go into a production such as “Spamilton” hoping for fall-on-the-floor funny, and it just isn’t that. Still, it’s good for myriad chuckles, and we’ll settle for that during what is a time not exactly packed with livetheater choices.