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...MONTY PYTHON LIVE...
...silent film thrived on that catharsis. So did vaudeville, and that Broadway combustion engine of explosive anarchy known as Hellzapoppin. Britain's Monty Python troupe, which opened live at Manhattan's City Center last week, renews that comic tradition, and its success in television, movies and now, onstage, shows that many audiences are parched for it. If there is anything novel about the Pythonites (six men, with extras for this production), it is only that they are practicing comic karate, English-style, and Americans always find it strangely exotic to think of the British as vulgar, irreverent, silly...
...Monty Python Live! the operative word is "live," for almost all of the routines have been seen before on American TV. Fortunately, they are unkillably hilarious even in repetition. Since the performers understandably need to catch their breath, film clips share equal billing with the live players' stage antics. When John Cleese delivers a diatribe to a shyster pet-shop owner while flogging the dead parrot that has been sold to him, the funning is lethally potent. So is the spoof on TV wrestling, in which the solo performer, Graham Chapman, is finger-jabbed and pretzel-twisted...
...owes a debt to Laugh-In and to Monty Python, last year's hit on PBS, for its free-associating mixture of inanity and insult. It owes another one, too: without Python's national success, it is doubtful whether Herb Schlosser, president of NBC, would have offered Dick Ebersol such a free hand when he told him last year to come up with a live show from Manhattan. Ebersol turned to Lorne Michaels, 31, a Canadian who was a writer and co-producer for Comedienne Lily Tomlin's award-winning specials. Michaels recalls: "I wanted a show...
Animal Crackers, Friday and Saturday at 7 and 10:30 p.m. and Sunday, 9:10 p.m.; and Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different, Friday and Saturday, 8:50 p.m. and Sunday...