"Monty Python's Spamalot" Where: PNC Broadway Across America and Pittsburgh CLO at Benedum Center, Downtown. When: Tuesday through Oct. 1; Tues.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $29.50-$73 at Box Office at Theater Square, www.pgharts.org and 412- 456-6666. Related article: British high-brow slapstick has few parallels in American humor.

The phone number for composer John DuPrez was at London's swank Savoy Hotel -- an ironic site for Monty Python, the quintessential English parodists of the pretentious rich. But irony cuts both ways: The Savoy operator absolutely denied DuPrez was registered there. Twice.

Eventually DuPrez (rhymes with pray) was located, and he laughed to hear of the snafu. "I gave them 20 pounds to say I wasn't here," he said. But lest we think he normally hangs out in such luxury, he was quick to point out that the Savoy is "our official hotel."

By "our" he means the musical comedy stage hit, "Monty Python's Spamalot," for which DuPrez and Monty Python's Eric Idle wrote the music. Even as the American tour of "Spamalot" wends its way toward Pittsburgh, opening Tuesday for three weeks at the Benedum, the London company is just starting rehearsals.

So DuPrez was bubbling over with fresher Python lore and observation than if "Spamalot" were just a show that made its triumphant debut a year and a half ago on Broadway.

He is not one of the original six Pythons, of course. As fans well know and even detractors (if there are any), the Pythons were five Brits and one American who launched an eccentric, groundbreaking and incredibly successful comedy show that ran on BBC-TV from 1969 to '74. Two pairs wrote together: the tall John Cleese with Graham Chapman and the short Michael Palin with Terry Jones. The American, Terry Gilliam, was the graphic artist. That left Idle, who defines himself as "the third-tallest Python," to write alone.

So perhaps it was fated he would find a collaborator, as he did DuPrez, in the early '80s. DuPrez refuses to say who wrote which parts of which songs. "Eric put it very nicely: 'I say A and you say B and the result is C.' We've evolved together. We have something special together that we don't have separately."

Although DuPrez calls Idle "an instinctive musician and guitar player," he is "primarily a word man [who had] a very good teacher, George Harrison. ... I'm a classically trained pianist, and I work with orchestras."

But DuPrez also has a talent for comedy songs, "which are all about delivery and how you build into a joke." So one may start a song while the other "midwifes" the process, or vice versa. He claims they even have a kind of telepathy, frequently calling each other at the same time. But visually, their partnership is easier to sort out: "I'm the fat one, and he's thin and famous."

They first worked together on "Monty Python's Life of Brian" (1979), when DuPrez was hired to play all the trumpets and French horns in the James Bond-like title song. Idle invited him to come meet the troupe to hear the result.

"It was a 15-foot-by-15 studio," DuPrez remembers, "and they were all there -- the atmosphere was electric. They're rather quiet on their own, but together, there's a chemistry." They played his "Brian" number "full blast and loved it."

He next worked with Idle on the Pythons' "Contractual Obligation" album, and for "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl," he had to "rebuild a lot of the music." Then came "Meaning of Life." He had graduated from musical arranger to co-writer.

The next step came when Idle played Ko-Ko in Jonathan Miller's famous production of "The Mikado" and rewrote the "Little List" song every night according to the news of the day. It went over so well he decided they might as well write for their own shows, not other people's.

But it took Idle and DuPrez 20 unpaid years to reach Broadway and the West End. None of their original projects has made it -- for example, "Back Page," a musical about cricket, sex and the royal family. Instead, it took a musical based on the movie made before DuPrez's path crossed the Pythons, the 1975 "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." When Idle called in 2002 with the idea of adapting it into "Spamalot," DuPrez jumped at the chance.

"We did it very fast. Then nothing happened for a year because of the lawyers. Then [director] Mike Nichols was too busy." But soon enough they were on Broadway, with success on every hand.

DuPrez does other work, as well. Now turning 60, he's composed more than 20 feature film scores, including "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I, II and III." He's also proud of his work for Weird Al Yankovic, showing an affinity for American parodists as well as British.

Back to the source

"Spamalot" is in the unusual position of a wildly successful stage musical only just now making its debut in the land where it began. DuPrez likens the situation to "an English football team bringing home the cup, or rather, in this case, the grail." The cast album even won a Grammy, which has been done by only three other Brits: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Elton John and Pete Townsend of The Who.

As we talked, DuPrez had just experienced the first "Spamalot" read-through by the new British cast. The creative team was still debating how much tweaking back toward Englishness the script would require. Should the references to Broadway become references to the West End?

The answer, said DuPrez with practical sagacity, is "that's why we have previews." There's no governing comic theory: "It works if it makes people laugh."

Of course, the reverse process had been a major concern when developing "Spamalot": bridging the gap between "two countries divided by a common language," between British humor and an American audience.

Python's humor is very verbal, and as DuPrez says, "you can't make word play if you don't understand the word." At the simplest level, this required some tweaking. For example, in the movie the Black Knight said, "Let's call it a draw," which was altered to "tie" in the musical.

DuPrez honed his own verbal pragmatism on two Idle tours of America, "Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python" (2000) and "The Greedy Bastard Tour" (2003), which went to 30 American cities, including Pittsburgh.

"The tours were the key factor for me," DuPrez said. "We knew for a fact that American audiences like Python, and we knew it worked live," but they had to weed out what didn't work.

It helps that Idle has an American wife and has lived in California for 10 years.

Americans may not get all the references, but, as with many jokes in Shakespeare, there's enough there that we do get for us not to mind.

There are also larger differences than linguistic. DuPrez cited the problem of accents: "There are only two accents in America," he said, the country-wide standard and Southern. That's a breath-taking simplification, but it's true that American accents are less finely differentiated than in Britain, limiting the possible comic play.

This relates to that pervasive British concern, class. In America, accents mainly indicate geography; in Britain, they mainly indicate social class. "Arthur is clearly a toff," said DuPrez, and "Galahad is a man of the people."

Beyond idiom and class, there's national identity. DuPrez noted that in John Cleese's movie "A Fish Called Wanda," for which he composed the music, the English audience laughs when Americans are made fun of (mainly through the Kevin Kline character), while the American audience laughs when the target is Cleese.

A further important difference is what the English call pantomime, a hybrid entertainment. " 'Spamalot' is a panto," DuPrez says, "with men dressed as women with hairy knees and audience members brought on stage for prizes."

But in general, DuPrez said that "everything Monty Python did is more or less an emotion-free zone," partly because women are reduced to caricature as bimbos or harridans. "But a musical is all about emotion, heart and soul. One of my contributions [on 'Spamalot'] was to bring emotion into the scene."