It's an evening of rapturous insanity - featuring killer rabbits, hurled cows, outed knights, dancing corpses, horseless horsemen, God, coconut shells and holy grails. And there's a lot of music.

Mostly, though, there's lots of anticipation. The audience I saw this with was so Python/Grail savvy they were applauding props, and whenever such familiar characters as the Knights of Ni or the French guard appeared, they almost wet their armor. Silliness still rocks.

For a movie that grossed less than $2 million in the U.S. 30 years ago, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" has created a vast and devoted audience. Thought by many to be the best of the Python films (my own favorite is "The Meaning of Life"), "Grail" is a showcase of the irreverent, inspired dottiness that made Python the pet snake of comic relief in the gloom of the '60s and '70s.

My anticipation for "Spamalot" was tempered by having endured so many earlier attempts - mostly in movies - to recycle cultural events and themes of the Vietnam era. Also, by my devotion to the six men who made up the group.

Watching Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman show up in so many different roles, often in the same scenes, was part of the Python charm. Terry Gilliam, the group's lone American, couldn't act a lick, but his illustrations were ingenious.

The clouds hanging over the stage at the Shubert put me in the mood immediately. They are Gilliam's clouds. And the opening number - by a group of Finnish fish-slapping dancers who show at the wrong play - establishes that there will be no fourth wall between the stage and the audience.

As for the cast, they are having so much fun, you can't blame them for not being the originals. They don't really try to be.

The Python members played their roles deadpan, in relative silence before cameras. These knights take their energy from the audience and satisfy our desire to wallow in the Python's past.

Tim Curry, with his commanding voice, has the most to do as King Arthur, but everyone has at least one show-stopping number. And Sara Ramirez, as the voluptuous diva Lady of the Lake, nearly steals the show.

Most of the memorable scenes of "Holy Grail" are in the musical, especially the collection of corpses, one of whom rises to lead a rousing chorus of "I Am Not Dead Yet." We even see Arthur and the knights dodging a cow catapulted over a castle wall by a band of insulting Frenchmen.

The three songs Idle wrote for "Holy Grail" are done up in over-the-top Broadway fashion, and Idle, working with John Du Prez, has come up with more than a dozen new ones, some of which expand scenes taken from the movie, others that take the story in a new direction.

Eventually, Arthur - guided by the Lady of the Lake on a quest ordered by God (the voice of John Cleese) - takes his search for the Holy Grail across Europe (and time) and on to Broadway, where cast and audience are literally joined.

It's an ending you don't want to have end.

Originally published on March 18, 2005