The Rest of Monty Python Blocked Eric Idle From Making a ‘Life of Brian’ Musical
A lot of attention has been paid to the recent squabbles between the surviving members of Monty Python, but they’ve been clashing with each other long before the days of social media.
In addition to the time Terry Jones threw a typewriter at John Cleese’s head, not everyone in the group was too thrilled with Spamalot, Eric Idle’s Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Michael Palin’s latest installment of his published diaries, There and Back, covers the years 1999 to 2009, which includes the time that Idle first began working on Spamalot. According to the book, when the idea was first floated, Cleese and Palin objected to Idle using “Monty Python” in the musical’s title, and Palin had “vaguely disquieting misgivings about the project as a whole.”
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Once Spamalot was completed, Palin didn’t hate it, but still wasn’t a huge fan. “For this jolly, happy, well-performed show the edges have been rubbed off, any psychological complexities lost,” Palin wrote before noting that Jones similarly “doesn’t like it much.”
Once the play was a hit, Idle began “pushing” for other projects that could potentially capitalize on its success, including an animated Spamalot movie. He also seemed intent on following up Spamalot with another musical based on one of their films: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But nobody other than Idle was very enthused about that idea.
“All of us (are) wary of Eric’s most recent suggestion — inevitable though it is — that he and (composer) John Du Prez be allowed to work their magic on Brian. General feeling that this is a different kettle than Grail,” Palin argued. Cleese was the only one who was open to the idea, with the stipulation that he be allowed to co-write the script.
Worried about the “damage” that would be caused by a delay, Idle kept hounding Palin about the Life of Brian musical. After one phone call, Palin noted that “talking to Eric is a bit like flying into enemy territory. Flak all around, most of it slightly off target but quite bright and noisy.”
Things didn’t get any better from there. Despite Cleese’s request, Idle wanted to write the script himself. He penned a draft, as well as some new songs with Du Prez, and sent the other Pythons a “testy” email informing them that the Brian musical wouldn’t be able to move forward without their formal approval. “Resent the pressure with no attempt on the other hand to understand our divided feelings on the project,” Palin wrote.
While Palin doesn’t elaborate any further, seemingly no deal was ever made. Idle did adapt Life of Brian for the stage in 2007, not as a full-on musical, but as a classical oratorio titled Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy). When asked why the Brian adaptation wasn’t a Spamalot-esque production, Idle slyly avoided the question with a joke, telling NPR, “We deliberately set out not to do a musical. We made too much money, so we thought, let’s find something that won’t make any money at all.”
Idle was joined by the other Pythons (minus Cleese) for a performance of Not the Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall in 2009, ostensibly to celebrate the group’s 40th anniversary. But even then, tensions ran high. The diary described how Jones and Terry Gilliam “are so constantly on the point of boiling over about the way they’ve been ‘used’ that I have to introduce a swear-box policy, with a pound for every criticism of Not the Messiah.”
Despite this experience, Idle briefly considered adapting The Meaning of Life as a Broadway musical, but gave up on the “disastrous” idea because the movie “had no common characters and no plot.”
Cleese, incidentally, was reportedly working on his own stage version of Life of Brian as recently as 2023. Which makes total sense now, since there’s a non-zero chance that it was launched purely to spite Idle for shutting him out of the previous adaptation.
