From the moment Tim Curry as King Arthur comes bounding out on horseless horseback, with clopping provided by his sidekick clicking two coconut shells together, we're happily in the land of ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the film on which the musical is based. This is the land where victims of the plague are thrown on death carts despite their comedically plaintive cries that they haven't expired, where heroes soil their pants out of fear, and where even the stoutest of souls can be rendered helpless when the enemy intones that dreaded word ''Ni."
The production stumbles a bit in the translation to musical theater, at least in the first act. Curry seems a self-satisfied straight man as Arthur, but the humor can feel old, and there isn't much of a sense that Idle, who wrote the book and lyrics, has upped the artistic ante at all, as Brooks did with ''The Producers."
On the other hand, ''Spamalot" is never anything less than Pythonesque. The opening scene is one of those delicious non sequiturs, a big musical number set in cheery Finland before the crew ''gets it right" and shifts the scene to sackcloth-and-ashes gray Great Britain. Then David Hyde Pierce enters to lampoon Curry for pretending to ride on a horse that isn't there -- the Pythons were, after all, among television's first self-referential postmodernists.
Pierce does a fine job infusing the timid Sir Robin with the soul of Niles Crane from ''Frasier." But the real star-power kudos go to Hank Azaria (''The Simpsons," ''The Birdcage"). Azaria is a stitch as Lancelot, when he's not doing Cleese-ian turns as the French Taunter and Tim the Enchanter. John Cleese himself is the only Python represented onstage. He has now graduated to the voice of God.
Tim Hatley's set does a great job of recapturing the Python look, and Mike Nichols's directorial sensibility is completely in synch with Idle's: There's a droll acceptance of what makes life so absurd, combined with a slapstick sense of what makes the absurdity of life so silly and, ultimately, something to cherish.
