The knights who say “Ni”. The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The legendary Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh. Mention any of these to hard-core fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and watch them launch into dialogue from the 1975 film, in which King Arthur recruits his Knights of the Round Table, seeks the titular relic, and has his general direction farted in by a taunting Frenchman.

The movie—written by and starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin—sends up the Arthurian legend with the classic Python one-two punch of deadpan surrealism and sheer absurdity. There isn’t a horse in the entire thing, for instance. Instead, each “mounted” knight trots around on foot, accompanied by a valet who hits two halves of a coconut shell together to simulate hoofbeats.

That running joke, and most of Holy Grail’s other key elements, show up again in Monty Python’s Spamalot, a stage-musical adaptation written by Idle in collaboration with composer John Du Prez. Spamalot was a smash when it opened on Broadway in 2005, earning iconic theatre and film director Mike Nichols a Tony award (his eighth) and spawning a West End production in London, a Las Vegas version, and a tour, which plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts from tonight (July 3) to July 27.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek tag line that says it has been “lovingly ripped off” from the film, Spamalot is no mere regurgitation of Holy Grail. Instead, Idle uses the show as an opportunity to poke gentle fun at the conventions of the Broadway musical. According to Christopher Gurr, who plays Sir Bedevere, Mrs. Galahad, and Concorde in the touring production, Idle has integrated that aspect into the story in a natural enough way that even those Python diehards who know every line to every sketch are more than pleased with the results.

“Yeah, they are, and I’m sort of impressed by that,” said Gurr, reached by telephone at his hotel room in Austin, Texas. “I was thinking they would be a more recalcitrant lot, but they’re not. I think Eric was really, really smart.

"He front-loads the show with verbatim excerpts from the movie, so once we hit what Python fans would call the Constitutional Peasant scene—which is Mrs. Galahad and her son in the mud, and Arthur rides up—it is almost a syllable-by-syllable extraction from the movie.

"Now, if you recall the movie, as the movie progresses it gets sillier and sillier and finally disintegrates. It really doesn’t end; the cops show up and arrest everyone. Well, Eric knows a musical comedy—especially an American musical comedy—has certain rules, and they are that it includes happy endings, and usually weddings, and so we have to have a love interest, so he introduces the Lady of the Lake. But that stuff jumps the track of the movie mostly in Act 2.”

Associate director Peter Lawrence, who has been a part of the Spamalot team since the start, told the Straight that Idle’s willingness to be flexible with the story has been a key to the musical’s success. Speaking from New York, where he’s in rehearsals for Shrek the Musical, Lawrence said:

“In rehearsal he was astonishingly generous with his material. That is, all the actors had the right to improvise material, to come up with new material, to change material—always, ultimately, with Eric’s approval. But he was not precious at all about the material. He was incredibly generous with our musical director and our choreographer in letting the musical numbers be expanded and changed in tone.

“Eric is a very spontaneous guy,” Lawrence continued. “He likes to fool around with the material. He’s always writing new lines. He will look at a scene and decide that he wants to change things within the scene. He’s very good about keeping the show fresh in that way.”

He is also prone to showing up when you least expect him. Gurr recalled one memorable encounter, which he remembers as one of the “trippiest” moments of his acting career. “We teched the show and opened it in Boston two years ago,” he said.

“And to be sitting in my dressing room opening night and to have a knock on the door and hear ‘Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more’ coming out of Eric Idle’s mouth coming into my dressing room was pretty bizarre.”

The character of Concorde, who is Sir Lancelot’s servant-steed, was played in the film by Idle himself, but Gurr said he doesn’t feel any pressure to emulate the British comedy legend’s performance. “He is the most generous of men,” Gurr said, echoing Lawrence’s assessment, “and he is having the best time with this show, and he doesn’t want you to be doing him up there. So, as long as you’re getting your laughs and you’re true to the spirit of the piece, he is incredibly generous. I no longer get nervous if Eric is out front.”

Gurr grew up a fan of Idle and his cohorts. He remembers catching episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS every Sunday night in his middle-school years in southern Georgia: “A particular set of nerds would gather on Monday morning behind the gym, and while the cool kids were smoking cigarettes we were reciting lines from Monty Python.”

Lawrence stressed, however, that even those who don’t know Monty Python from Monty Burns have been won over by Spamalot’s charms. “My mom lives in Ohio and she’s now 88 years old,” he said. “She thought Monty Python was a person. She had no idea what the humour was about. And when she came to see the Broadway show, she enjoyed it just on the level of a Broadway musical.”

In other words, Spamalot has something for everyone—even folks who have never done battle with the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.