Musicals Mocking Musicals

Fourteen Tony nominations for Monty Python's Spamalot – if we needed any more evidence that we're in some Golden Age of Musicals That Send Up Musicals, there it is. The adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Ka-niggets of the Round Table take up the new quest of starring in a Broadway show, has landed on the New York stage with a roar of approval and appears destined for the same sweet success as fellow spoofy musicals – spooficals? amusicals? – The Producers, winner of 12 Tonys in 2001, and Urinetown: The Musical, Tony winner for book of a musical and original score in 2002. And they're just the most visible tip of a musical-mocking iceberg that includes such recent off-Broadway treats as Bat Boy: The Musical, Debbie Does Dallas – The Musical, and even The Musical of Musicals – The Musical! Shows that send up the song-and-dance spectacular and all its endearingly hokey conventions are hardly news – you can trace 'em back at least as far as 1970's Dames at Sea – but as Cats, Les Miz, and the rest of their quasi-operatic, steroid-swollen ilk have wound down, the self-mocking musicals have been flourishing. And now they're about to sweep Austin. Urinetown is slated for the Zachary Scott Theatre Center's 2005-2006 season, Bat Boy flies into Arts on Real in just two weeks, and next Tuesday Bialystock and Bloom, those bad boys at the heart of Mel Brooks' The Producers set up Springtime for Hitler in Bass Concert Hall. The national touring production stars Bob Amaral and Andy Taylor as the disaster-prone theatrical entrepreneur and his nebbishy accountant who want to scam their way to wealth by mounting a surefire flop – the aforementioned musical valentine to Nazi Germany – only to have it become an unlikely hit. Naughty Austin, which showed us Debbie Does Dallas last summer, is bringing us Bat Boy, which is not, alas, set underneath the Congress Avenue bridge. Co-creators Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O'Keefe based their tale on the circulation-boosting hero of the Weekly World News, who is discovered in a cave near Hope Falls, W.Va, and brought into human society, only to have it turn on him. In both shows, as in most of the self-mocking musicals, the creators have loaded the proceedings with winking acknowledgments of show-biz artifice and style, but they've also hung them all on a solid dramatic frame that keeps you invested in the characters even as you're laughing at them – in other words, the shows work as real musicals even as they're poking fun at them. That may explain the secret of their recent success: They let us laugh at all that silly stuff in musicals we feel too smart to fall for now while they satisfyingly slip it to us under the table.

The Producers runs May 24-29, Tuesday-Sunday, at Bass Concert Hall. For more information, visit www.utpac.org.

Bat Boy: The Musical runs June 2-July 23, Thursday-Saturday, at Arts on Real, 2826 Real. For more information, visit www.batboyaustin.com.