Theater

King Mike and The Quest for the Broadway Grail

“Four minutes’ laughter!” Idle was now recalling, amid his mussels at the Square Table of Orso, where he and Nichols had brought their fear-eaten souls, along with the glamorous Mrs. Idle, Python wife of 24 years. “It was the biggest laugh we ever had! I was proud of us, because we actually bothered to set up a gag. Instead of just saying ‘Oh, it’s just a bloody interview!’ we set up a great gag.”

“A great gag,” said Nichols, chuckling. “A shocking gag.”

“Shocking because it’s mocking the dead,” said Idle. “It’s a fuck-you to death!”

“That’s what is so maddening about all this correctness superimposed on comedy,” said Nichols, grandly spearing theme like rigatoni, which he also speared, but not as grandly. “You must have heard about Bill Murray’s speech at Gilda’s memorial. Gilda Radner was dead, of cancer. Everybody loved her. It was impossible not to love her. We’re in NBC Studio 8H—where they did Saturday Night Live. Everybody makes speeches. Bill Murray—I never liked him . . . I still don’t really like him, but there’s no way not to admire him . . . He’s a remarkably gifted guy. He stood up and said, ‘8H—I remember when we worked here, I was in love with Gilda, and at the time I thought I was the only one she was sleeping with.’ Stuff like that for a while, then he went on to say, ‘And then this guy came and he married her. And he took her to California, and then he killed her.’ He wasn’t there, of course—Gene Wilder. But it was ten seconds of stunned silence, and then certainly the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard. We were hysterical. Hysterical because that’s what everybody felt. It was Gene! Gene, he killed her! It was everybody’s secret rage, completely unfounded, at having lost Gilda. But who wants the burden to say it at the memorial? But it’s the gall to do it. And the ashes and the urn were even more shocking.”

And now, I reminded them, audiences down the street can behold dead people singing and dancing. Both men brightened at mention of the spectacle.

“They love that number!” said Idle.

“They love it,” echoed Nichols.

“It’s really shocking,” said Idle. “They never see it coming!”

God’s voice, no less, imbues Arthur and knights with their theatrical quest (because they require one), and since that Divine Voice (on tape) belongs to John Cleese, no less, greater poetics are at obvious work. “Actually, I ad-libbed a bit,” Cleese offers from his California home. “When Arthur says, ‘Good idea, God!,’ I ad-libbed the line, ‘Of course it’s a good idea! I’m fucking God!’ ” He adds, “I don’t think it survived.”

Blessedly, for Idle’s sake, all surviving Pythons consider Spamalot a very good idea, and supplied helpful notes along the way, though none has yet seen the show. Cleese, who has magnanimously sublet his New York apartment to Tim Curry for the run, plans to attend opening night (or, per marquee, OPENING KNIGHT). Last fall, he briefly visited rehearsals and watched the gaudy Camelot number take shape. “It was already hilarious in a silly kind of way that I couldn’t remember anything else being silly, comparably,” he says. “Just full of joy and silly nonsense. Everybody came out of it with sort of mindless grins, looking vaguely pink and healthy.” Michael Palin, meanwhile, contributed to the Playbill a set of meticulously absurd mock-program notes for an imaginary production—Bin Faaarkrekkion’s New Moosical: Dik Od Triaanenen Fol (Finns Ain’t What They Used to Be). This gesture from Palin, who has in recent years become a BBC travelogue purveyor, warmed Idle no end. “I can see him being wistful for comedy, hankering,” Idle said of his old mate, at dinner. “Because you don’t lose that thing where you want that laugh. I keep trying to nudge him. He’s got more to give.”

“Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with,” Nichols now said, recognizing intimately the bittersweet in Idle’s comments. “A terrifying amount of it is. I couldn’t do it at all at first, and then I could only do it with Elaine. Then I could do it with certain other people, but like only 20 percent of what I could do with Elaine. There’s nothing like two or three or four people finding something that is like love—or whatever the hell it is—and having things happen that surprise them all. Therefore, who you’re with is everything. It’s very lonely and scary and awful to do it alone.” In afterthought, he also said, “Elaine and I had a long phone conversation today, because she saw the show yesterday, and she was so nice about it.”

Elaine May had, in fact, attended the private afternoon “gypsy” performance of Spamalot—a customary pre-preview unveiling for show folk and friends only—and brought with her Stanley Donen, the legendary director of Singin’ in the Rain (“The best movie musical of all time,” according to Nichols, and history). Afterward, Donen told Idle “all this flattering stuff—he’s seen everything since the thirties, and he said, ‘It’s the best musical in ages.’ He loved the fact that the music kept commenting on what was going on . . . I was lapping it up, like the cherry on the cappuccino!” Also customary before a gypsy preview is an introductory speech delivered by the show’s director, the stark prospect of which had given Nichols great pause. One night later, at the Square Table, Idle provided illustration. “I realized,” he said, “that Mike is basically—still, no matter what he does—a comic, first and foremost. For about 24 hours he obsessed with it. Then he said, ‘You’ve got to do this with me!’ Yesterday morning, he calls me first thing and says, ‘Now, about our bit . . . ’ Not a concern in the world about the play. Just the bit—it’s about the bit!”

“But you felt the same about it,” said Nichols, very bemused. “It’s our bit, for God’s sake.” “Utterly! Of course!” said Idle. “We were like kids backstage, panicking. All the cast is going by, and we’re not even reassuring them. They’re doing a first show, a first performance!”

“It had nothing to do with them,” Nichols protested.

“They don’t realize that we have to go do a speech!” said Idle.

“Then Mike said, ‘You have to stand on this side of me, on the right side, because that’s where Elaine stood.’ I thought, Oh, I’m being Elaine for a day!”

“It’s really true,” confirmed Nichols. “It’s really strange. I can only turn that way. It’s like your side of the bed!”

“So,” said Idle, cheeky as he will ever be, “we’ve been on Broadway together for one night only! Isn’t that great? Yeah, we did it.”