Spectacle review: An ex-ex-parrot: Monty Python’s absurdity ages well in stage …

‘Albatross!” yelled John Cleese as he wandered onstage on Tuesday at London, England’s O2 arena, sporting a candy floss-coloured snack girl’s outfit with fake bust and blond wig. The stuffed bird in a box around his neck seemed less of a prop than a symbol: Ever since Monty Python’s last series of shows in 1980, the demand for a live reunion had been impossible to shake off no matter how much each member wished to focus on other projects. So as the ancient comedians finally regrouped for the first of 10 performances — billed as the last they’ll ever do — one question lingered: What’s the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Wait, that wasn’t it. It was: Could they somehow live up to their own looming legacy? Despite the familiarity of the material, this greatest hits sets by comedy’s biggest-ever troupe may even have added something — a dollop of affection.

The show opened with irreverence, as we’ve come to expect: An animation on three giant screens around the massive music hall-inspired stage set showed late Python Graham Chapman’s head being bonked around between planets in space like a giant pinball, and proclaimed, “One Down, Five to Go.” The five surviving members — Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin — emerged in evening wear from a Doctor Who-esque phone booth dubbed the “RETARDIS” to soak in applause from a crowd that had bought 14,000 seats in 44 seconds, as the screens announced, “PHOTO OPPORTUNITY” — no part of the evening would go by without a knowing nudge nudge, wink wink.

No part of the evening would go by without a knowing nudge nudge, wink wink

So too with the tent in the arena’s concourse advertising “Stuff for Money” and the onscreen “Merch-o-Meter” during the interval, purporting to show what fans, already kitted out as Bruces, Gumbies and Spam-eating Vikings, had spent on “Keep Calm and Buy a Shrubbery” T-shirts. Reuniting for money is the one cliché the Pythons couldn’t avoid — a lawsuit over royalties for the musical Spamalot last year left them with hefty legal bills — so they embraced it.

But they spent a lot as well: The £4.5-million production had a glitz that recalled the Pythons’ last film, The Meaning of Life (1983), rather than the knowingly low-budget sets from their early TV years. A cast of 20 singers and dancers, choreographed by Meaning of Life’s Arlene Phillips, offered over-the-top musical numbers, from the cod ballet “Spam Lake” to a Silly Walk-inspired, leg-lifting dance that let John Cleese, his hips hampered by “various operations,” off the hook.

Perhaps wisely, the Pythons relied on older skits that Idle, as director, stitched together; in a device borrowed from their 1980 Hollywood Bowl shows, some of the TV material they couldn’t reproduce onstage was broadcast onscreen as costumes and sets were changed. Of course, this invited comparisons between the now-septuagenarian Pythons and their younger selves, and not always to salutary effect: sketches like “The Lumberjack Song” that rely on the haplessness of youth seemed a bit off-key.

The smattering of new material varied in quality: A filmed Stephen Hawking cameo harked back to the best of their highbrow-meets-lowbrow lunacy, but hearing the Pythons Viagra and cellphone jokes during the “Bruces” number — even when dressed up as comedy Australians — was rather sad, and a walk-on part by Stephen Fry couldn’t save a too-long update of the 1970 “Blackmail” sketch that satirized the British media’s celebrity obsession.

Idle had told the Post at a press conference the day before that the Pythons’ material was timeless because they were never in the satire business, so the occasional topicality felt odd — aside, perhaps, from an onscreen invitation to “Visit Canada … with its elks and exciting mayors.” Some older sketches were dated: No matter how striking Palin and Idle look in lingerie, the limp-wristed camp routines felt stale, and the “I Like Chinese” song, which on record sends up Little England views of foreign countries, seemed patronizing when gussied up as a song-and-dance number by an all-white cast.

‘Visit Canada … with its elks and exciting mayors’

And yet, and yet — the best Python material becomes funnier each time one sees it, rich with absurd logic, linguistic and visual creativity, and sharp repartee, and in some respects the Pythons have grown as comic actors. Cleese, despite a hoarse voice and a paunch, has a Grand Old Man presence that gives him more authority as the Pope or a self-satisfied bureaucrat; Palin seemed fervid in throwing off his everyman travel-host persona as the leader of the Spanish Inquisition and Jones even more likeably beleaguered as a cardinal that follows him around; Gilliam revelled in his larger performance role as a sort of imp of the perverse, culminating in a triumphantly disgusting turn as the exploding Mr. Creosote. Idle, meanwhile, was a likeably louche crooner, directing the crowd sing-alongs to numbers like a rather lovely “Galaxy Song” with starry lights and a rousing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

One couldn’t blame thePythons for cracking themselves up as they savoured their own material. Where once they wanted to shock, they’ve settled into a mainstream that they themselves helped make weirder. Their achievements are worthy of celebration, as the soon-to-be ex-comedy troupe runs down the curtain one last time to join the bleedin’ choir invisible.

Monty Python Live (Mostly) screens July 20 at Cineplex cinemas across the country.

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