As Spamalot goes on sale, silliness erupts

The fellow clutching a placard advertising an internet cafe ("cheap rates for international phone calls") at Cambridge Circus in London yesterday may have felt a little confused by the cluster of deeply hooded monks who joined him, wielding signs marked "GRAIL SALE".

Later the brothers' ranks were swelled by scabrous peasantry handing out pens, badges and Spam sandwiches for Spamalot. The hit Broadway musical, "lovingly ripped off" from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is finally crossing the Atlantic.

It was a hint of immense silliness to come. Audiences can look forward to killer rabbits, pesky French soldiery, and a Camelot that is more Las Vegas than Sir Thomas Malory.

Doubts that the musical, which will feature first Tim Curry and then Simon Russell Beale as King Arthur, may not prove the hit on its home turf that it has been on Broadway in the US were temporarily swept aside by the enormous queue of punters outside the Palace theatre, eager to snap up the first tickets for the October opening.

Hayley Scanlon, 23, was first in line for the show. "I'm a really big Monty Python fan," she said. And you'd have to be, to queue for three and a half hours before booking opened.

Eric Idle, one of the six original Pythons, wrote Spamalot with composer John Du Prez - the result of a long ambition to write musical theatre when the pair worked with director Jonathan Miller on his 1989 production of The Mikado.

"The hardest thing to do was persuade them it could go well," said Idle, who had to convince the other surviving Pythons, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, John Cleese and Michael Palin, that Spamalot was a good idea. "They were very defensive of their material, understandably. In the end one of the numbers - The Song That Goes Like This - cracked them up."

According to Idle, "the greedy bastards" have achieved "the best rights deal on Broadway, not that they know, they never read a fucking contract".

The show finally opened on Broadway in March last year and recouped its initial $13m (£7.4m) investment in a record seven months. It has attracted droves of men in their 20s and 30s to New York's Shubert theatre, traditionally an elusive Broadway audience and truly a Holy Grail for producers.

Idle says he will not adjust the musical - which contains Broadway in-jokes, including a rude song about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who happens to own the Palace theatre - for British audiences. But he does not rule out tweaking it according to audience reaction. "The first preview will be the key, that's when it all becomes evident," he said.

Curry will start as King Arthur, with Beale replacing him from January.