Eric Idle’s musical mined the `Holy Grail’ of comedy

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A few years ago, Eric Idle had a blinding flash of inspiration about his next career move: He would write a musical.

Of course, Idle is an alumnus of one of the funniest comedy teams Western civilization has ever produced, England’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus, so the material would have to be hilarious.

“I was playing Ko-Ko in a production of The Mikado, and I was really enjoying myself,” said Idle, 63, as he tried to ignore fans on the busy patio of a Studio City coffee bar. “One night I thought, `This is what I should do next!’”

Idle felt his chances of success were bolstered by the dearth of musical comedy on Broadway and West End stages at the time. “I always thought musical comedy would come back. There were helicopters, levitating mansions, lots of sex—everything except what I think the audience loves best, which is comedy.” Idle leaned in conspiratorially. “Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber killed it, you know. Yes—my own countryman.”

Idle went to the author of the funniest movie musical he’d ever seen. “I met with Mel Brooks to try and persuade him to let me do (a musical-theater version of) The Producers. I said, `I’ll play Bloom and you can play Bialystock. We can do it at the Old Vic with Jonathan Miller directing.’ He was very sweet. He said, `No thanks, I’m really happy just directing movies.’”

Idle sighed. “And we all know what happened to that project. Complete bomb!”

Idle and his creative partner, British composer John Du Prez, cycled through a blizzard of other sources, searching for their inspiration. “We wrote something about sex, royalty and cricket, which appeared on the radio—a very good place for a musical, since you don’t have to pay for sets and costumes.”

Separately and together, Idle and Du Prez fiddled with other ideas. But nothing presented itself as the ideal subject for a big-budget musical comedy.

This agonizing search leads to an obvious question: At what point did Idle look in the mirror, whack himself on the forehead and go, “Duh!”?

“Yes, yes. The Grail was under my nose the whole time.” (Idle is referring, of course, to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the 1975 film that rocketed the group to the comedic stratosphere in America and prompted college students from Ann Arbor to Annapolis to memorize such routines as “The Killer Rabbit” and “Bring Out Your Dead.”)

Artfully altered to give it a more coherent story line, outfitted with songs by Idle and Du Prez and directed by veteran Broadway hand Mike Nichols, the musical adaptation, called Monty Python’s Spamalot, wowed audiences and charmed critics during its Chicago tryout and at its 2005 Broadway premiere. A streamlined version, shortened and shorn of an intermission, opens Saturday at the Wynn hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

It wasn’t as if Idle had never entertained the possibility of turning Grail into a Broadway musical. But as a piece of communal property, the issue of adaptability was a tricky one.

“I might have thought of it and then dismissed it with, `No, they’ll never let it go.’”

The surviving members of Python (Graham Chapman, who played King Arthur in the film, died in 1989) all had a hand in the movie’s creation, and it was co-directed by Python members Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

“I had to approach them collectively,” Idle said. “The only way to do it was to show them how we might go about it. So I wrote a book and then we wrote some songs, recorded them, and sent them a CD.” Included in that collection was a later crowd-pleaser, “The Song That Goes Like This.”

“They just loved it,” Idle recalled. “They all said, `OK, this is fine. Off you go.’”

Idle knew he was working with material that a lot of Americans of a certain generation knew intimately. “(Monty Python had) done two stage tours of America, and during the second tour we did bits from Grail. And (audiences) knew it all. It wasn’t just where you’d expect them to know it, in L.A. and New York, but people from all over the place—particularly on college campuses. People would come up to us and quote scenes to us—boringly and amazingly dully.”

Idle wanted to expand on that base for the musical. “The next step was to attract ... an audience that didn’t know it. In order to be really successful, I knew I needed to reach that larger group.”

To that end, Idle was determined to land the best talent he could for the debut production, and he did. Besides director Nichols, he snagged actors David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry and Hank Azaria. “These are actors whom a lot of people know and want to see,” he said.

Almost as important as pleasing critics and audiences was satisfying his former Python colleagues, Idle said. To a man, they seemed happy with the result.

“It’s a crowd-pleaser is what it is,” Gilliam told The Buffalo News after seeing the musical. “It’s certainly put a bit of life into the old Python corpse.”

Idle’s memories of making the 1975 film are not all pleasant.

“It was made for about $400,000. We shot it in five weeks, mostly in Scotland, and used all the daylight hours that you could possibly film, which wasn’t very much. We were wet all the time—when I watch the film I can tell how late in the day each scene was by how far up my body the water had crept.”

Idle thinks the small budget worked in the film’s favor. Using coconuts to imitate horses was a joke that developed out of economic necessity. The producers had planned to use real horses but realized it would be prohibitively expensive.

“I think not enough money is best, especially for comedy,” Idle said. “Money only goes for trailers and hookers and drugs. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And it meant that a lot of the scenes were shot in one take, which kept us on our toes.”

In the musical adaptation, one of Idle’s biggest problems was dealing with the movie’s dozens of characters, most of whom appear in only a single scene. He eliminated some and split the rest among the cast. And the film’s ending had to be changed—Arthur’s quest is brought to an abrupt halt by the appearance of modern-day police, who storm the set. “It was only a stopgap for us because we couldn’t afford a real ending.”

One of the satisfactions of producing Spamalot on Broadway, Idle said, was finally having enough money to do justice to things that never got tried in the film. It was also gratifying to introduce a new generation to Python’s madly brilliant brand of humor more than 30 years after it first made people laugh in Beatles-era Britain. But not everybody in the group was on the same page as Idle.

“Originally, (some of the other Python members) didn’t want me to put the name of Monty Python on it,” Idle said. “Finally, when we were going to Broadway, I said, `Guys, are you sure you wouldn’t like to see the name “Monty Python” in lights up there on Times Square?’ And they said, `Hmmm, yes, that’d be nice ... oh, OK then!’”

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