Two athletics sessions aren't really enough to keep a teenager entertained over a weekend, so I threw in a show and a film too.
The show was Spamalot. Safe enough ground if you like Monty Python. Eric Idle had been the least successful of the Monty Python team post Python, at least commercially until he penned this musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with other Pythonesque bits chucked in with more or less contrivance, such as the Fish dance, the Spam song (fleetingly) and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. It is all very silly, and the Python stuff is leavened with some very non-Python style material (a lot of puns for example) but it all works as an entertainment. Its biggest strength is just how much the cast seemed to enjoy it, led by Joe Pasquale as King Arthur, not an obvious choice for a musical lead given his lack of a singing voice. But all in all, just very good fun.
Now You See Me is on the surface quite the opposite. A very slick film about a quartet of magicians who are put together to form ever more outrageous Vegas style magic performances, culminating in a Bank raid, performed live on stage. You need to see it. . It is, as I say, very slick and fast-moving, indeed so fast-moving that you don't get the chance to stop for a moment and think that what you have just seen didn't make any sense. I would definitely recommend it though as a fine piece of hokum. Veterans Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are on the cast list but the real stars are Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg.
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