Monty Python's Eric Idle and director Mike Nichols are old friends.    (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)

And so, during the first eight weeks of 2002, after years of vague noodling, he and veteran Python composer John Du Prez whipped up the first-draft book and a demo disc of the score for Spamalot—which, in case you wondered, takes its name from the knights’ preferred dietary supplement: “We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot!” Producing impresario Haber leaped forth with initial backing—“within 24 hours of getting the package!” he says, stunned at his own soft touch. “You know how astounding that is?” Soon thereafter, a director was required, and Idle had only one in mind, and he was an old friend, and there was no real hope he would wish to withstand the madcap toil of building a daft Broadway blockbuster. “Forget it,” Haber told Idle, “he doesn’t want to work this hard.” Nevertheless, Idle said, “What the hell, might as well give it a try.”

He sent it to me and I said, ‘Oh, shit!’ ” recalls Mike Nichols, half-century sovereign of American Comedy (among other things), and wielder of much gilded hardware by Oscar and Tony and Emmy and Grammy. “Because I didn’t want to do a musical. But I got it and said, ‘I’m screwed. I have to do this.’ It’s going back to beginnings for me. It’s what I did when I started.” When he started, he started in Chicago (like Spamalot; hello, symmetry!), as a founding member of the Compass Players, first renegades of improvisational comedy, progenitors of the Second City, in whose number was Elaine May, with whom he would become very famous for being dangerously funny. (Upon their first meeting on the University of Chicago campus in early 1954, she regarded him only with a defiant syllable—“Ha!”—and then walked away, begetting a historic partnership of celebrated complexity, and something like lifelong love.) Together, they toured, made record albums and TV appearances, and generally intimidated with brilliance. In late 1960, An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May began thrilling Broadway cognoscenti and humans alike nightly, at the same time that Burton and Camelot debuted down the street. But when neuroses tore the pair asunder, his performing life ceased and, in 1963, he directed Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, earning his first of four Tony awards for helming Simon’s work. (Others came as producer of Annie in 1977 and as director of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing in 1984.) Meanwhile, his filmmaking career had begun at zenith with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate (1966 and 1967, respectively, the latter winning him a directorial Oscar), continuing apace ever since with Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, Working Girl, Regarding Henry, Wolf, The Birdcage, Primary Colors, and last year’s Closer, among the 22 in his canon, including the recent HBO events Wit and Angels in America, both of which brought forth Emmys. Only once, however, had he dared to direct a Broadway musical comedy, a nice-enough folly called The Apple Tree, by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, starring Alan Alda and Barbara Harris, which opened in October 1966 at the Shubert—which is precisely where he has now returned nearly 40 years hence with Knights Who Say Ni and French Taunters and a Killer Rabbit. And even he cannot fathom this. “For a director,” he says, “a musical is a special kind of hell.”

“Taste is the enemy of art,” says Nichols. “Of life and vitality of all kinds, and sex—all the funny things.”

Here, then, is King Mike, wise and jolly, on a chill afternoon, dressed darkly per usual, one week before the start of previews, folded warmly into the back of a West Side recording studio where the quite insane and soaring cast album is being captured for eternity. (This, of course, telegraphs boldest confidence in product, to record full shebang five weeks before any national Spamalot review has been written. “It really is like Hubris City!” confirms the sturdy Tim Curry, who is merely King Arthur.) Nichols, brightly 73, is sanguine, regally so—pinkened laugh-cheeks ever at the ready—and mostly silent in deference to Idle and composer Du Prez, who fuss near the mixing boards, as full orchestra and ensemble make music behind glass. He sits with feet planted in soft-soled comfort, a bit of a pasha belly bouncing at any sudden comic nuance, whereupon his bespectacled eyes will widen with glee; his blonde bride of seventeen years, Diane Sawyer, has on occasion called him “His Royal Cuteness,” which seems about right. His voice rumbles always with peerage, and did long before earning it. Of Nichols’s earliest acting roles in Chicago, Compass forefather Paul Sills told The New Yorker, “He wasn’t the working-class man and couldn’t come close to it.” Die thus cast, nothing much changed. Marvels Curry, “I don’t think anyone has said no to Mike since about 1957.” As such, reverence follows him around, if cheerily. “It’s a bit like having Lenny Bruce in the room,” says Du Prez. “It’s fantastic. We call him Our Leader.” Says Azaria, who gave Nichols his unforgettable Birdcage turn as mincing man-maid Agador Spartacus, “His track record is intimidating, but he’s not.”

He is, in fact, kind of a fun king. He seems to whirl in measured antic air, and demonstrates this by leading me away from the studio—“Let’s sneak off, shall we?”—while the show’s breakout diva-discovery Sara Ramirez (The Lady of the Lake) and Christopher Sieber (the dopily strident Sir Galahad) lay stirring voice to a glorious Andrew Lloyd Webber parody anthem, “The Song That Goes Like This.” “They waited for me,” he confesses, once we are sequestered in a tiny room down the hall. “They waited a year, because I couldn’t stop Closer, since the four people in the movie were never going to be free at the same time again. So they waited, which must have been annoying and screwed up everybody’s schedule and all.”

But, in truth, the prolific Idle refused to sit, well, idle and kept rewriting his dream show, largely in search of a fluid plot, a trifling burden ignored in the film version, in which no Grail was ever found. “Every time Eric and I would have a conversation, he would do a new draft,” says Nichols. “Over and over. More and more drafts. We had to have at least the pretense of a plot. Not an elaborate plot, just a plot. One of the things that I love about this show is that you’re saying to the audience: This is just a gesture of a plot. And they say, ‘But we love it. We need it.’ Because, all together, them and us, we’re all admitting and celebrating why we’re there: Tell me a story. And, if possible, if you have a Grail, you have to find it. That’s the challenge.” Ingeniously, Idle finally deduced a way to make this happen, as ridiculously as can be imagined, with no small assist from the nightly patrons. “To make them part of this discovery and mission ritual,” Nichols says, flush with mirth, “has turned out much more exciting than could have been predicted!”