KING ARTHUR wants to star on Broadway, his manservant Patsy is Jewish (or at least “half-Jewish”), Sir Lancelot is gay — and the audience loved it.

Spamalot, Eric Idle’s new musical “lovingly ripped off” from the cult film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, won a rapturous standing ovation from its first paying audience at the Shubert Theatre in Chicago on Tuesday night.

As an encore, the crowd of Python addicts old and young sang along with Idle’s merry anthem, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, sneakily smuggled into the show from the comedy troupe’s film The Life of Brian.

One theatregoer brought a stuffed white “Killer Rabbit” as his date. Another wore a crown and a medieval costume with “Spam” emblazoned across the chest. Yet another wore a badge warning onlookers: “I fart in your general direction.”

The Shubert’s gift shop, selling collectors’ edition tins of Spam and “Fetchez la Vache” T-shirts, was swamped as though the Beatles had suddenly descended on the Midwest.

Rafael Ross, a prep school teacher who also runs a school of medieval swordsmanship, said: “I teach Arthurian literature in Miami. We flew up here for this. I show the film to my class and I had to see the show.

“I thought it was wonderful. It was amazing in their ability to stick to the film and yet have so much fun with it.”

Idle, who wrote the show, watched the performance from the midst of the crowd.

He took a bow from his seat in the stalls when the curtain went down. “It worked very well. We are thrilled. It could not be better for a first preview,” he told The Times as he was besieged by autograph-seekers.

The production, directed by the legendary Mike Nichols, who won an Oscar for The Graduate, overlaid the Python’s customary absurdism with a heavy measure of Broadway camp.

Purists could delight in the retelling of the now-classic jokes from the 1975 film, such as the “Knights Who Say Ni!”, the obnoxious “French Taunter”, the “Bring-out-your-dead!” wagon and the lethal “Killer Rabbit” — played here by a glove puppet.

Although none of the six original Pythons was on stage, John Cleese won wild applause with a tape-recorded cameo appearance as the voice of God.

But casual theatregoers could still thrill at the spectacle of it all.

The film’s almost entirely male cast has been augmented with a clutch of dancing girls, a starring role for the Lady of the Lake, a gay dance number and a string of topical jokes.

In one scene a chorus member waved a “Support Our Troops” sign as the Knights set off in their quest for the Holy Grail.

Idle composed more than a dozen new show tunes for the production with his longtime collaborator John Du Prez, based on such memorable Python lines as “Run Away” and “I Am Not Dead Yet”.

One new ditty, however, stretches the bounds of good taste with the warning: “You won’t succeed on Broadway / If you don’t have any Jews.”

The run in Chicago is an out-of-town test to iron out the kinks in the show before the musical moves to New York’s Broadway on February 7.

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