Did I say that it poured violent rain Valentine’s night? Because it did, and the 44th Street edifice of the sodden Shubert had been reconfigured as a turreted castle with five enormous windows, inside of which were likenesses of a sword-wielding knight, a foolish cow, a blonde maiden, a bloodied Killer Rabbit, and a headless sentry clutching his armored helmet containing the smiling face of Nichols. (“It was an idea of Haber’s,” says the director, shrugging. “He took me there and presented it to me. I said, ‘It’s cute. It’s all right with me.’ It seemed like the glasses were straight.”) Anyway, damp first-night previewers bustled inside for such token merchandise as officially sanctioned coconut halves (designated Right and Left), YOU’VE GOT GRAIL! T-shirts, plush fanged-rabbit puppets, toy farm-animal catapults, and collector’s-edition cans of Hormel Golden Honey Grail Spam (“It’s Crusade-a-licious!”). Expectation fluttered merrily, and there was Steve Martin and also Burt Reynolds (no one knew why) and also Tony Danza and Carol Kane, and Idle and his lovely wife, Tania, took their usual aisle seats three rows behind Nichols, legal pad and bottled water in his lap, and things went pretty joyously, and eager recognition applause welcomed familiar nonsense from the film (though it was fascinating to watch Steve Martin giggle especially at the most nuanced bits of stagecraft). But then there came abject hysteria once Hyde Pierce embarked on the second-act showstopping number, a bravura bombast called “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)”—sample lyric: “There’s a very small percentile who enjoy a dancing Gentile!”—whose transcendent incorrectness soars defiant amid neighboring houses playing Fiddler on the Roof, Jackie Mason’s Freshly Squeezed, and Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays. (Hyde Pierce had told me coyly a few days earlier, “Hopefully, it will strike a chord.”) It is, doubtless, the stuff of nascent Broadway Legend, replete with Yiddish chorus line in chain mail. Anyway, when all was done and confetti flew, ovations were long and standing and longstanding, even as Nichols and Idle threaded backstage, slightly harried of expression, smugness not yet their option.

Afterward, a quiet euphoria hovered in the wings, where principals accepted notable visitors, and Martin was so overcome that he had lost all sense of bearings (“What way is 44th Street? Is it this way? No, that way? Which way?”), and Danza and Kane grinned and milled luminously, and Idle had lost his wife completely, and Curry, descended stairs, his eyes shot red, and fell into the bear hug of Nichols, who said, “Tim, one note: When you come on in the second act, just come on,” the meaning of which would belong to them alone. Hyde Pierce, meanwhile, also shambled into the stairwell, posture limp, his eyes flashing, dizzied still by the reception for “the Jew song,” as it’s known in company rank. “After the first setup,” he said, “I knew they were with me. Amazing!” And Nichols wandered about, cautiously withstanding platitudes, and muttered only this in my direction: “Seems to work, seems to work. Strange, though, if you take one thing out and think it’s going to be better, and then you miss it. . . . Now we just get to keep working on it.” There would, after all, be another month to hunt down babies.

We’re fighting in the Daily News,” Idle said delightedly the next night. “I love that! We must maintain it!” He referred to a column item of Sunday, February 13, wherein a Chicago “backstage blabbermouth” averred, “Before they started previews, Mike Nichols and Eric Idle were not talking at all,” and that “Eric would come to rehearsals with new pages of script that would be given out to the cast before Nichols had even seen it.” Thus, ice had allegedly formed between them. Nichols countered this within the same item, via his publicist: “Working with Eric, and the relationship I have with Eric, is what brothers should be but rarely manage.” There is, in fact, per naked eye, only easy warmth in their togetherness, the winking bond of clever boy-men who know they’ve gotten away with much in life but weren’t supposed to. “The whole process of this play has been one of laughter,” Idle will say endlessly, as does his director. Nichols, however, told me, “We did start to argue before we went into rehearsal, and it scared the shit out of me. I was cavalier and would run over things, and he’d say, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! There’s a thing here. Pay attention to this. You’re not looking at that.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no, this is going to be difficult.’ But the second we started to work together [in rehearsals], we agreed on everything! It’s a fucking miracle.” The entrenchment, he adds, only pointed up their existential parallels: “We discovered what I never knew, that we had similar—not technically similar—very miserable growing-up times. He was in boarding school, I was in boarding school; we hated it thoroughly. In many ways, we are more similar than I ever realized.”

“I realized,” says Idle, “that Mike is—no matter what else he does—a comic, first and foremost.”

Further parallels: Both were born not here—Nichols in Berlin; Idle in South Shields, England. At 7, Nichols (né Michael Igor Peschkowsky) moved to New York, without his mother; Idle shipped off to boarding school (“a semi-orphanage”). Both lost fathers when they were boys: Nichols was 12; Idle was 2. Both were bookish loners, saved by theater at college (University of Chicago and Cambridge, respectively), and not long thereafter took over the universe, with and because of partners. They met each other nearly three decades ago at a party at Paul Simon’s apartment; Idle, a fan, didn’t recognize Nichols, a fan right back—“We were both very funny with each other,” Idle says—until someone told him afterward that his new acquaintance was Mike Nichols. Their family vacations in Barbados have since coincided more than once; Richard Avedon took snapshots.

Also, their former comedy partners are never terribly far from their ongoing professional lives: Elaine May wrote the screenplay for The Birdcage and Primary Colors, and will do the same for Nichols’s next film, based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel Skinny Dip. And Idle could not have created Spamalot, legally or spiritually, without full Python agreement—that is, the unresisting assent of Cleese, Gilliam, Jones, and Palin, who have not much been like-minded in the past twenty years. “The history of post-Python projects,” according to Idle, “has been like middle-age courtship, fraught with frustration, Byzantine negotiations, hot flashes, disappointing flurries of enthusiasm usually ending in stalemate, and droopy disappointment.” Until now, the rare exception was their notorious panel reunion at the 1998 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, during which Gilliam “accidentally” kicked over an urn believed to contain the cremains of Graham Chapman, spraying dust clouds everywhere, and inciting profane mayhem.