I know the ending. I know it well. Still, I felt salty tears emerge as King Arthur commanded the young lad, Tom of Warwick, to run, to hide, to grow up and have hope in the future.
Hope is what the end of the musical Camelot gives. Hope. In spite of the betrayal of Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur’s knights seeking revenge instead of justice, he finds hope in an eager young boy who has come to join the legendary round table. There is still hope in Camelot as Tom of Warwick holds tight to the ideals of Camelot and Arthur hopes that he will grow up to seek a more civil society.
What an oft told tale it is of King Arthur and his round table, his knights and his beloved Guinevere, Lancelot du Loc and the evil Mordred. Merlin. For a six and some-year-old woman, who first encountered Camelot while on assignment for her high school newspaper in that sixties decade of assassinations and idealism, a far off war and civil unrest at home, innocence and awakening, seeing the musical Camelot all these years later was a revival of hope, a theme that keeps playing out in between the lines of my December musings.
As I sat in Oakbrook Terrace’s Drury Lane Theatre, immersed in the atmospheric set design and entranced by the exquisite costuming, I heard the Lerner and Lowe tunes bubbling up inside me before the songs sang lifted out. I know them so well, yet, they felt so fresh, and the production seemed again quite relevant to me. “Camelot”. “I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight”. “The Lusty Month of May”. “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” “If Ever I Should Leave You”.
So it came to be, as a guest of my dear friend Marilyn, for a brief and shining moment I WAS in Camelot. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.
Do you have a favorite song or line from Camelot?
Did you ever read T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King”?
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