Charles Shaughnessy: Playing It Straight and Earning Huge Laughs in "Spamalot"
The dapper star of television’s “The Nanny,” “Days of Our Lives” and “Mad Men” finds his grail as King Arthur in Ogunquit Playhouse’s sparkling production of “Monty Python’s Spamalot”
Affable stage and television star Charles Shaughnessy – best know for playing Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield in the hit 1990s television series The Nanny – is currently bringing his natural wit and effortless charm to the role of King Arthur in the Ogunquit Playhouse’s rollicking production of Monty Python’s Spamalot. Continuing at the 78-year-old Maine seacoast landmark through September 11, Spamalot also stars Broadway’s Rachel York (City of Angels, Victor/Victoria, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) as The Lady of the Lake and Jeffry Denman (Cats, The Producers, White Christmas) as Sir Robin.
Though recognized for his many years on The Nanny, Days of Our Lives and most recently Mad Men, Shaughnessy is no novice to musical theater. He has starred as King Arthur in Camelot, Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady and Caldwell B. Cladwell in Urinetown on Broadway. A British native born into a show business family (his mother was an actress and his father the principal writer and script editor on Upstairs/Downstairs), he studied drama in London and spent many years performing on stage before getting his big break on daytime television in Los Angeles. An alumnus of the famous Footlights Revue comedy group in Cambridge, England and a self-professed Monty Python fan, Shaughnessy is well equipped to handle both the pomp and the absurdity of his role in the Tony Award winning musical “lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
“I have to confess, I didn’t really want to have anything to do with Spamalot originally,” Shaughnessy says candidly in a recent telephone interview. “As a Monty Python purist, I thought the musical would be just a cheap shot to get all the fans to come and quote all the lines. 
But I have to say that seeing the way this show came together in rehearsals, I now love it. The show actually works. The songs and the lines aren’t thrown in willy nilly. It all makes sense. Before seeing the show I was unconvinced. But now I’m a big fan.”
Shaughnessy credits director/choreographer Scott Taylor and his “incredibly talented” cast with making a convert out of him. When not involved in a scene, he enjoys watching the hilarity that is swirling around him.
“I’m having a blast,” Shaughnessy exclaims. “Scotty has come at this with incredible energy. With eight days to get the show up, there’s booster rocket fuel behind it anyway. But coming at it as a choreographer who had been in the original show, Scotty had a natural sense of rhythm. He absolutely got it that any sort of indulgence and any sort of ‘playing the comedy’ was going to detonate a huge bomb under it. He was very keen to just let the comedy play itself. He was very, very adamant about that. He said, ‘If you find yourself being funny then you’re doing something wrong.’ ”
Taylor’s approach to creator Eric Idle’s outlandish material is paying massive dividends in Ogunquit these days. He and his cast have managed to bring a hilarious spark to jokes and songs that often go “on and on and on” by mixing inventive bits with exquisite comic timing. A show which felt stale during its national tour is now fresh and genuinely funny. Members of the entire ensemble – principals included – are serving the production and not their own egos. The result is a non-stop joy ride that never lets the audience see it sweat.
“This cast is fantastic,” Shaughnessy beams. “They are so good at what they do. Their routines, their musical numbers, their singing – I’m laughing as much as anyone. When I’m not actually speaking I really enjoy watching it.”
Much of Shaughnessy’s career has been spent playing the straight man reacting to the comic chaos around him. He says that suits him just fine. Every clown needs a foil to make the comedy work, and Shaughnessy’s easy chagrin perfectly suits him to play the nonplussed Abbott opposite the more colorful Costello.
“You do get cast in similar roles because of certain traits that you bring,” says Shaughnessy. “What I bring to this Arthur has a lot to do with Mr. Sheffield. 
I bring the slightly wounded pride and frustrated authority. In ‘The Nanny’ Fran and Miles took absolutely no notice of my character’s authority. I was constantly undermined. I’d say, ‘But I’m the father here,’ just as Arthur says, ‘But I’m the king.’ In both cases nobody pays attention to it. Both men are constantly struggling with a lack of respect.
“What’s nice about Spamalot is that Arthur is redeemed in the end,” Shaughnessy says. “He realizes that the Lady of the Lake has been with him all the time. Patsy and the Knights have been with him all the time. He’s not alone. I think playing Arthur as a real character, a serious character with a sincere through line, helps ground his reactions so that they are not over-reactions. In trying to play the truth of every moment, the comedy comes through naturally. The audience identifies with the character because his frustrations are real. That’s what makes it funny. If you comment on it, trying to make it funny, that’s when it all falls apart.
"Spamalot" continues at the Ogunquit Playhouse through September 11. Tickets, priced from $49 to $67, are available online at www.ogunquitplayhouse.org or at the box office by calling 207-646-5511. The season concludes September 15 through October 24 with "Chicago" starring Ogunquit favorite Sally Struthers as Matron “Mama” Morton.
PHOTOS COURTESY OGUNQUIT PLAYHOUSE: Chalres Shaughnessy as King Arthur and Rachel York as The Lady of the Lake; Charles Shaughnessy and the cast of Spamalot; Jeffrey Scott Stevens as Patsy and Charles Shaughnessy; Rachel York and Charles Shaughnessy
regional theater company, the North Shore Music Theatre of Beverly, Mass. has gotten happily back on track with the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber crowd-pleaser, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Owner Bill Hanney and Producing Artistic Director Evans Haile have wisely gone back to the well, hiring seasoned director/choreographer Jayme McDaniel to mount this high-energy romp in the round. McDaniel, no stranger to Joseph or the team of Rice and Webber, very successfully staged Jesus Christ Superstar at NSMT in 2006.
(quite literally, in this case) whose ability to interpret others’ dreams takes him from papa’s boy to persecuted slave to the Pharaoh’s much revered second in command. He has a sure, steady tenor that wraps itself easily around Rice and Webber’s pop-rock score, and he demonstrates a cheer-inducing key-changing riffing ability on several occasions, as well – most notably at the end of his moving prisoner’s solo ballad, “Close Every Door.” While his acting is not as nuanced or commanding as one would hope for in a Joseph, Fedorov nonetheless has a confident and amiable stage presence that will only strengthen as he gains experience.
Joseph’s widely eclectic score is all over the map musically, but the deliberate mishmash of genres creates a delightfully comic pastiche that McDaniel stages cleverly for huge laughs. Joseph’s brothers generate most of the fun as they coolly emulate the Jets in a West Side Story send-up (“Joseph’s Dreams”), wax laconic in a cowboy-western riff (“One More Angel in Heaven”), or don dreadlocks and play steel drums for “Benjamin’s Calypso.” The Pharaoh (deep, sexy-voiced Gary Lynch) enters the building in full Elvis regalia, singing his dream to Joseph in all-out hip-swiveling rock ’n’ roll. The Act I finale, “Go, Go, Go Joseph,” is a 1960s Carnaby Street feast highlighted by mini-skirts, psychedelic Afro wigs, and white vinyl go-go boots.
Like a child who doesn’t know when to stop saying “Look at me, look at me,” however, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat sometimes gives us too much of a good thing. Several reprises wear out their welcome, and the Pharaoh inexplicably repeats his Elvis impersonation note for note, gesture for gesture. Then in the “Megamix/Finale,” half a dozen of the show’s flashiest songs are replayed, this time to a driving techno beat.
At Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse, where the nation’s first fully staged regional production of this Tony Award-winning musical is now running through August 14, popular stage and television star Stefanie Powers handles her assignment with a balanced intensity that is both elegant and captivating. In a role that’s often parodied or played for camp, Powers finds the truth and 
Gearhart does his best to alternate between cool detachment and increasingly tormented self loathing, but he never truly engages with his co-stars or mines the complex contradictions that drive him to destroy himself, his true love, and the woman he has grown simultaneously to admire and resent. Throughout much of the musical exposition with which he is encumbered, he substitutes energy for emotion, mechanically telling the tale rather than cynically deprecating his own tragic folly. In his big solo, “Sunset Boulevard,” he misses the danger foreshadowed by his easy submission into the life of an amoral gigolo.
providing moving insights into Norma Desmond’s character. With stirring melodies and exquisite lyrics, these songs reveal the touching vulnerability yet glorious past of a woman deified, used, and then destroyed by a Hollywood studio system that discards obsolete talent like crumpled old tissues.