MIKE Nichols didn’t have much luck on Broadway last season producing “The Play What I Wrote,” a short-lived revue based on old sketches by the fabled British comedy team Morecombe & Wise.
But that hasn’t deterred him from attempting another revue inspired by yet another British comic institution – Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Nichols is bringing a compilation of the best of the Python sketches and songs to Broadway in the spring, theater sources said yesterday.
Details are sketchy, but word is the material will be drawn from the Python television show as well the movies “The Life of Brian,” “The Holy Grail” and “The Meaning of Life.”
The show will not be performed by any of the real Pythons (one is dead, the others are a bit long in the tooth to do eight shows a week) but by a cast of young comics, British and American.
No one is ruling out the possibility, however, of guest appearances by John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin.
Nichols is producing the show with Bill Haber, the multimillionaire co-founder of Creative Artists Associates and the producer of last season’s great flop, “Dance of the Vampires.”
I imagine Nichols will use some of the most famous sketches – “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” “The Pet Shop (a.k.a. The Dead Parrot),” “The Argument,” “Whither Canada” – as well as the musical numbers “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” “The Lumberjack Song” and “Christmas in Heaven.”
But I hope he’ll also choose a few that are less well-known but are just as funny. My personal favorite: “The Tennis Match, by Sam Peckinpah” in which the players are covered in blood and have their arms chopped off during the match.
“The Man With Three Buttocks” is very good, too, and concerns a man with three buttocks who, while being interviewed on television, steadfastly refuses to drop his pants.
Will a Broadway show based on Monty Python fare better than one based on Morecombe and Wise?
Well, it has this going for it: Monty Python is famous in America; Morecombe and Wise never were.
On the other hand, I wonder how well the material has aged.
Cleese and Palin performed “The Pet Shop” on “Saturday Night Live” a few years ago and it went over like, well, a dead parrot.
Still, hum a few bars of “Every Sperm Is Sacred” or “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and I guarantee you’ll find yourself chuckling.
AND now for something completely different: Last Friday, in an article about a reading of Arthur Miller’s new play about Marilyn Monroe, I reported that Tovah Feldshuh took the part of a pushy acting coach who, I said, was based on Anna Strasberg.
Blame it on my youth and ignorance, but I was wrong.
The character is in fact based on Paula Strasberg; she, not Anna, was Monroe’s pushy acting coach on the set of “The Misfits.”
Paula died in 1966; Anna is very much alive and is anything but vulgar and pushy.
A highlight of this summer’s Fringe Festival will surely be “Waiter, Waiter,” a sinister new comedy by David Simpatico.
Set in a trendy New York City restaurant, the play examines what can go awry when the normally civilized staff drop their façades of friendliness and rip into annoying customers. They also turn on one another – with deadly results.
“Waiter, Waiter” runs Aug. 8-24 at the Greenwich House Theater on Barrow Street.
For details call (212) 279-4488.
For more information on the Fringe Festival, check out http://www.fringenyc.org.
