Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) (Picture Production Company, Python [Monty] Films, Stage 6 Productions, 2009, released 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I dug through the DVD backlog for a movie I could show Charles and I, and what I came up with was Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy). Given the participation of two-thirds of the original members of Monty Python (all but the late Graham Chapman and the living but estranged John Cleese) and the basis of the show’s plot in the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I had expected this to be a musicalized version of Brian the way the stage show Spamalot was a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Instead it turned out to be a filmed record of an October 23, 2009 performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall of a parody oratorio written by Eric Idle (text) and conductor John Du Prez (music) based on the plot of Life of Brian. The title Not the Messiah is a pun; it refers both to the scene, carried over from the movie, in which the perplexed Brian (William Ferguson, a boyish-looking tenor who’s quite good in his sweet-voiced way, though his future is probably as a concert singer since I suspect that little voice would be overwhelmed in an opera) is mistaken for the Messiah and tries to convince the throng that’s assembled to worship him that he really isn’t; and the work’s status as a deliberate parody of the British oratorio genre in general and Handel’s The Messiah in particular.

The show began in a shorter one-act version commissioned by the Toronto Symphony and its principal conductor, Peter Oundjian; later it was expanded to a full evening’s entertainment and presented on a tour of Australia and New Zealand — including a stand at the iconic Sydney Opera House where it was effectively double-billed with The Messiah: the hall presented Handel’s masterpiece in the afternoon and Not the Messiah in the evening. This Albert Hall performance was the only one given in Europe and was intended to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Monty Python TV show, and though no one either in the concert video or the “making-of” featurette mentioned the parallel, Not the Messiah is as much or more a parody of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar as it is of Handel.

The performance was excellent, with four first-rate vocal soloists — soprano Shannon Mercer (as Brian’s girlfriend Judith), whose blonde hair and rather “hard” face made her look so much like Hillary Clinton she’ll be an excellent choice if anyone writes Hillary: The Musical; mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright (Laurence Olivier’s sister-in-law — Lord Olivier’s last wife was Rosalind’s sister, actress Joan Plowright) as Brian’s mother Mandy; tenor William Ferguson as Brian himself; and bass-baritone Christopher Purves as authority figures on both sides of the Roman-Jewish divide, including the leader of the People’s Front of Judea as well as the Roman general “Biggus Dickus” (and Purves is a hot, hunky bear type whom I found myself hoping he lives up in real life to his Roman character’s name) — along with the BBC Philharmonic and an equally fine chorus. (About the one usual aspect of British oratorio they did not include was a chorus of boy trebles.) The piece was a fair adaptation of the original and included an hilarious number called “We All Love Sheep” featuring Carol Cleveland (the attractive young actress the Pythons used in the original show when they needed a good-looking woman instead of one of the Pythons in drag) wearing a shepherdess’s dress with three puppet sheep attached to it. (This was apparently based on a number shot for the original Life of Brian but not used in the final cut.)

We also got to see Michael Palin in (bad) drag as “Mrs. Betty Palin,” who gave the introductory narration (and at one point had to push her sagging falsies back into place) and Eric Idle — whose singing voice is listed in the final credits as “Baritonish” — not only playing several characters in the main story but doing a bizarre parody of Bob Dylan on a song called “Individual” that was one of the highlights of the show. Not only did Idle render a Dylanesque lyric almost totally incomprehensible, he did a few fart-like noises on a racked harmonica and the chorus members came out with harmonicas of their own to back him up in what’s probably the weirdest-sounding ensemble since the multiple banjo players in James Reese Europe’s 1914 Clef Club Orchestra. (Europe was the first African-American to lead what would later be called a swing band, and his group had the separate reed, brass and rhythm sections of later big bands but also a whole banjo ensemble.) While I missed one of the funniest gags of the original Life of Brian — the so-called “Palestinian Suicide Squad” that supposedly come to rescue Brian and his fellow crucifixees but instead merely stab each other to death — most of the rest of the familiar Life of Brian plot points got into Not the Messiah and the “Lumberjack” song from the original TV show got performed twice, once rewritten to fit into the Life of Brian plot and again, come scritto, as an encore.

About the only thing that bothered me was the use of flesh-colored tips on the head microphones the cast members were wearing, which at first looked like boils until I realized what they were. Though hardly as funny as the original Life of Brian, Not the Messiah, with its bizarrely eclectic mix of musical styles (especially the bagpipers in two scenes and the mariachi-style Mexican trumpets in another) and breezy (and very Python-esque) irreverence for musical as well as comedy conventions, was lots of fun. It also turned out to have a current political resonance I hadn’t expected and clearly none of its creators intended: the opening scene, in which Brian’s mother Mandy Cohen explains that he’s the product of a one-night stand between her and a Roman soldier who promised her “all the gold that I could eat” (one of those lines you’re likely to miss at first and then think back, “Did she really say ‘all the gold that I could eat’?”) if she’d have sex with him, couldn’t help me think of Kamala Harris and her mixed heritage (part Jamaican Black, part East Indian) and both her own difficulty in figuring out where she fit into America’s often bizarre racial caste system and her opponents tying themselves into knots trying to figure out which set of insulting racial tropes they should fire at her!