A Vegas-style number in front of a castle looking suspiciously like the Excalibur -- yes, it looked that way on Broadway, too -- is perhaps a good omen for "Monty Python's Spamalot" on the Strip. John O'Hurley and Nikki Crawford, center, headline the Wynn Las Vegas edition. "This is not a tough show, this is a fun show," John O'Hurley, front right, says of the King Arthur role first played by Tim Curry on Broadway. The Lady of the Lake (Nikki Crawford) is not in the "Holy Grail" movie, but serves in part to parody Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musicals with "The Song That Goes Like This."

Other Broadway musicals have come to Las Vegas and had their eyes gouged out and their elbows broken, their kneecaps split and their -- well, if you've ever partaken of that generational rite of passage known as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," you know the rest.

But Eric Idle figures his musical stands a bit outside the whole debate of whether Broadway can work on the Strip.

"We're sort of the anti-Broadway show. We mock Broadway, we laugh at it," he says.

Oh, there is that little matter of "Monty Python's Spamalot" winning three Tony Awards and grossing more than $100 million in less than two years at the Shubert Theatre.

Or that some of the show's critical respect might have been jump-started by the involvement of Mike Nichols -- yes, that Mike Nichols, whose credits range from "The Graduate" to "Angels in America" -- as director.

Now the cash cow has been catapulted to Las Vegas. "Spamalot" was scheduled to launch its Wynn Las Vegas residency Thursday, with previews leading to a formal opening March 31. Time will tell if this will be the musical that holds its own against Cirque du Soleil where others have failed.

But if you believe the Pythonite who guided the Grail tale to the stage, it was Broadway that concerned Idle more than any city where the hit comedy has cleaned up on tour. "What I didn't know is that we'd find this other audience that liked musicals," he says. "That's the thing we discovered (during pre-Broadway previews) in Chicago, that we got regular theatergoers."

Idle later volunteers that he knew the title would have to reach outside the Python cult to be viable. "Spamalot" undoubtedly owes much of its blockbuster status to the ease with which it plays to both sides. But some of that crossover success must come from the fact that, Idle says, it's "not a regular show at all."

Watching it with an audience, he can hear them "get it after about five minutes. They go -- 'Aaaah!' You just hear gratitude: 'Oh God, this is going to be enjoyable. Oh good, OK I get it.' "

Seeing "The Producers" on Broadway in 2001 motivated Idle to begin work in earnest. "I knew it was inevitable that musical comedy would come back. You couldn't forever watch helicopters land onstage," he says of "Miss Saigon" and other '80s-era melodramas.

But two comedy tours of the United States with "Spamalot" composer John Du Prez were what really convinced him the cult of Python was large enough for the musical to take flight.

Tour stops such as the December 2003 visit to the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay served as "therapy" to the waiting game on the show's financing, Du Prez recalls. When Idle would get a big laugh on tour by dropping the title (inspired by a lyric from the "Grail" movie, "We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot"), "We knew there was huge good will towards it."

"In America, it stays a living force for some weird and wonderful reason," Idle says of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." The original British ensemble comedy show first aired in 1969, and still pops up on KLVX-TV, Channel 10, and other public TV stations around the country. Because of that, U.S. audiences "know it better than English audiences."

After the show ran its course in 1974, Idle and the other Pythonites (John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and the late Graham Chapman) created their first original feature, skewering the King Arthur legend with "Grail" in 1975. The financing came from rock band fans including Pink Floyd and Genesis, but the budget was still so low it inspired the trademark gag: Arthur and his knights aren't on horseback, but coconut-clopping servants follow them around.

" 'The Holy Grail' is something almost everyone in America knows as a reference point," Idle says. "I think it's a college thing. There were lots of screenings at colleges we didn't know about. People were basically ripping us off for about 20 years. Then it all pays off!" he adds with a chuckle.

In New York, "Spamalot" plays across West 44th Street from "The Producers," and it opens on the Strip a month after that show came to Paris Las Vegas. Idle says he approached Mel Brooks about a stage adaptation of "The Producers" after guest-starring in a British revival of "The Mikado" in 1986.

"I was still young enough to play Bloom and he would have been a great Bialystock" says Idle, who turns 64 on March 29. "I thought I could seduce him to London (but) as it is so often, the timing wasn't right. Only later on in the '90s did I start thinking, maybe the 'Grail' would be a good idea."

Idle says it's no coincidence that both hits sprang from cult movies which didn't originally burn up the box office, instead building their fame at revival houses or the midnight movies that pre-dated home video.

"A cult film has more strong affection to it, it's quirkier and weirder and maybe touching something a little deeper than a regular mainstream film," Idle says. "They tend to be made more with love, (by people) more committed so that they have more in them than a regular big-budget movie."

After gaining the consent of the other Pythons -- who ultimately decided to keep an arm's length -- Idle and Du Prez turned the cult movie into the mainstream musical that hasn't slowed down since it began its Chicago previews in late 2004. "You throw a stone in the pond and the ripple just keeps spreading, getting wider and wider and wider," Idle says.

Still, the comedian isn't oblivious to concerns that the Strip will be the show's first stumble, after "Avenue Q" played to less-than-capacity in the same Wynn theater.

"Whether it's a Vegasy kind of entertainment is a whole other different question," Idle concedes. "There's so much to see in the two or three days that you're there that word of mouth will really have to percolate."

But he ultimately has faith that "Spamalot" will be tasteless enough to succeed.

Musing over the fact that local "Avenue Q" ads made the mistake of not showing its star puppets, Idle opined that "you can't have class and comedy. They're not the same thing. Comedy is falling on your ass. It's not class."