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Record attempt for musical
23/02/2006 07:25 - (SA)
London - Proudly boasting he had lovingly ripped off the cult movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle launched his quirky musical Spamalot in London on Tuesday, hoping to match its record-breaking Broadway run.
With flatulent Frenchmen, killer rabbits and a legless knight, the supreme silliness of Monty Python returns home to Britain in October with Tim Curry reprising his Broadway role as King Arthur.
Next January, Simon Russell Beale, currently playing the part in New York, will take over. The show has been taking around $1m a week and won three Tony Awards last year including best musical.
Offering launch party guests spam sandwiches, badges bearing the slogan "I fart in your general direction" and a singalong chorus of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Idle revelled in mocking showbiz hype.
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He brought one of the producers on stage to sign a cheque, quipping "That's a rare enough sight on Broadway", and he got the set designer to shine a torch on tiny polaroid shots of the lavish set designs.
Idle said director Mike Nichols only won a Tony award for the Broadway production "by shamelessly spreading rumours that he was dying".
Quashing press reports that some of his fellow stars in the Seventies British TV comedy classic series were not that enamoured by Spamalot, Idle said "We persuaded the Pythons to go along with it."
John Cleese was cited in the press handout notes as saying he was delighted at seeing some songs "skewered definitively - it was liberating".
Making fun of Dick Cheney
"It is a crowd-pleaser is what it is," fellow Python Terry Gilliam was quoted as saying. Michael Palin had "a feeling of great, ebullient and redeeming silliness".
Idle told the launch audience: "I am the sixth nicest of the ex-Pythons and certainly the cheapest.
"I didn't want to do this for a living," he added, setting up one of the Pythons' most famous lines - "I wanted to be a lumberjack".
Asked why he chose to launch the musical in New York before London, he said: "I went away to make a fortune in the United States where the people are less discerning and the critics more bribeable."
But he did confess to being tempted into a name change before opening night after US vice-president Dick Cheney accidentally shot a friend whilst out quail hunting.
"Dick Cheney will probably be calling it Monty Python and the Holy Quail," he said.
- Reuters
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South Africa
