NEW YORK – Eric Idle sometimes looks up to the sky and wonders if we’ll ever contact aliens: Will they have a sense of humor?
“I think the answer has to be yes, because it’s about self-awareness,” says the founding member of the comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “It’s about laughing at yourself, at your own death, and at your inevitable end, about which you can do nothing.”
Until there’s a space rendezvous, Idol’s mission on Earth is to make us laugh, and he continues that mission a national touring edition of their hit musical “Spamalot,” which opens in Ohio this week.
“I think laughter is important and it is both a relief and an improvement in the way we look at life,” he says.
The tour will visit more than 30 cities in its first year, including Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis, Houston, and Milwaukee.
Idle says, “Comedy is the greatest form of musical theater because it has everything you want – it can have drama, but it can also have laughs, dancing, girls. It has it all.”
“Spamalot” is built on shenanigans that include a group of bushwhacking knights, people clicking coconuts to imitate the sound of horse hooves, a singing and dancing plague victim, flatulent Frenchmen and killer rabbits.
The stage story is based on the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Which concerns King Arthur and his quest to bring with him some knights who will set out with him to find the grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at The Last Supper.
Idle recalls that the original film cost $400,000 to make – partially funded by members of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, who was looking for a tax write-off – and was filmed over five weeks in Scotland. “It was cold and sad, but it was fun,” Idle says.
The inspiration to turn it into a stage show came while Idle was working on a CD-ROM game based on “The Holy Grail”. “I suddenly said, ‘Wait a minute, if you can turn ‘The Holy Grail’ into a game, you can definitely turn it into a Broadway musical.”
Idle wrote the story and lyrics and the music is by John Du Preez. Idle says the secret to the show’s success was the tapping of famed director Mike Nichols. ”Mike knew everything about funny,” he says.” It came to Broadway in 2005 and won a Tony Award for best new musical.
A few years ago, Idol discovered his long-forgotten diaries from that time, which revealed stressful moments and behind-the-scenes struggles in the making of the musical. He has published them as “Spamalot Diaries.” “It’s kind of a way of making a musical,” he says.
Two highlights of the show are the Act II opening song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, which was taken from another Python film, “Life of Brian”, and the upbeat final number – “Find Your Grail”, with the lyrics “Keep your eyes on the goal/Then the prize won’t fail/That’s your grave.”
Idle says one of his favorite moments was watching the audience emerge from a Broadway show singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and clicking coconuts purchased at the merchant kiosk.
“If you can brighten people’s lives by being a fool on the street immediately afterward, I think you’ve done a pretty good job,” he says. “Not a lot of shows do that.”
Composed of Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman, Monty Python brought a unique blend of satire, surrealism and silliness to British TV screens in a series that ran from 1969 to 1974 and several subsequent films.
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