From Deseret News archives:
'Spamalot' scene-stealer hams it up
Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with her hair swept up in a pony tail, the 29-year-old actress and singer resembles more a laid-back beauty contestant than a woman capable of theft.
But according to the buzz around "Monty Python's Spamalot," Ramirez has not just stolen the show from David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry and Hank Azaria. What she's done is grand larceny.
No, no. Ramirez insists she's not guilty.
"I'm kind of like the filler in between the Monty Python bits," she says in her small Shubert Theatre dressing room, still piled with moving boxes. "I'm just sort of filling in the gaps."
Never has mere filling been so praised. Reviewers have left the theater drooling over Ramirez: "Smashing," the New York Daily News cheered, while The New York Times hailed her as "a toothsome devourer of scenery" who "knows how to send up vintage performance styles until they go into orbit." For its part, The Associated Press called Ramirez "a voluptuous, vocally powerful siren" who "seems to be channeling Liza Minnelli by way of Cher." And, of course, there's talk about a Tony nod.
Ramirez, however, just laughs at such award predictions.
"It's almost like talking about a wedding: I don't know if I'm going to get married," she says. "But if it happens one day, great. And if not, life will go on."
Ramirez, after all, has been in the vortex of hype before. Her Broadway debut came in 1998 with a part in "The Capeman," Paul Simon's $11 million musical that closed after just 68 performances.
This time, Ramirez's role as Lady of the Lake is pure goof ball, a part substantially enhanced from the character in the 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," from which the show is "lovingly ripped off."
As envisioned by Python veteran Eric Idle, who also co-wrote the music with John Du Prez, Ramirez's character has morphed from a strange woman lying in ponds to the love interest of King Arthur.
One of her big numbers is "The Song That Goes Like This" — a gorgeous parody of a saccharin Andrew Lloyd-Webber ballad from "Phantom of the Opera" that she shares with Christopher Sieber, complete with oversized chandelier.
"It's very cool to see somebody on the verge of quite possibly being one of the biggest Broadway stars in history. After the critics and the audiences see her, she's going to explode," Sieber says.
"People are going to be knocking on her door left and right. She's going to be the next biggest, bona fide, huge Broadway smash star that everybody is going to want for every show they ever produce."
