Tonight and tomorrow night, November 3-4, as well as next weekend, November 12-13, the Montana Actors’ Theater (MAT) will be recruiting people for roles in their upcoming musical Spamalot and for participation in their 24 Hour Play Festival.

Auditions for Spamalot will take place at 7:00 on both Wednesday and Thursday evening at the MAT Theatre in Cowan Hall on the campus of Montana State University—Northern.

Adapted from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Spamalot is a musical comedy featuring all the typical King Arthur characters accompanied by show girls, killer rabbits, and outrageous others who encourage the audience to “always look on the bright side of life.” Like the motion picture, the script adaptation is a highly irreverent parody of the Arthurian legend. Not only a play on the word Camelot, the title, Spamalot—according to the show’s book writer Eric Idle—is derived from the movie in which one of the characters says: “I eat ham and jam and Spam a lot.”

In this two-act play, a troupe of vagabond storytellers arrive in a plague-ridden Tudor village with their pageant wagon and all its tricks to perform a hysterically inaccurate version of King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail. This new take on Idle’s already twisted script promises “to thrill Monty Python and musical theatre fans alike” because the quest brings King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to strange places and into the company of strange characters while challenging them to keep their heads about them or die terribly weird deaths.

In their second quest for creativity, MAT is looking for writers, directors, actors, and technical assistants for what they are calling a “fun-filled and frenzied event.” MAT’s 5th Annual 24 Hour Play Festival event will take place over two nights, November 12-13.

On the Festival’s first night, Friday, November 12, from 7:00 until 8:00 p.m., the audience and the theatre crew will gather at Crawford Distillery, located at 336 2nd Street in Havre. At this social gathering, teams of writers, directors, technical assistants, and actors will be created based on a random drawing. One writer, one director, and an equal number of actors will comprise each team. Next, a headline will arbitrarily be drawn from a collection of newspapers. These drawing proceedings will be live-streamed on Facebook. This ends the first night for the audience.

The writer then has until 7:00 on Saturday morning to write a fifteen minute script inspired by the headline and utilizing the actors he/she has been assigned. At 8:00 a.m., the script goes to the director and the cast, who have until 8:00 that night to rehearse the script.

The resulting Festival Shows will be performed on Saturday, November 13 from 8:00-10:00 p.m. at the MAT Theatre in Cowan Hall. Each play will run approximately 15-20 minutes.

Anyone interested in acting, writing, or directing for the Festival should sign up at mtactors.com/24. Individuals interested in participating as audience members simply need to show up each night at the Distillery and then the Theatre.

Questions about either event can be directed to MAT staff by calling 406-945-0272.