What do a philharmonic orchestra in white dinner jackets and black ties, a 40-piece choir, four opera singers, fireworks, a 32-piece bagpipe band, a narrator, some sheep and a leaf blower add up to?

For Eric Idle – a lot of laughs.

On the heels of their Tony-winning Spamalot, the Monty Python alum and his musical collaborator, John Du Prez, have whipped up Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy).

Like Spamalot – which is still playing on Broadway and in Las Vegas – NTM is based on a Python film. This one is the 1979 Life of Brian. Not the Messiah is also a spoof of Handel's famous 1741 oratorio (you know the one), with a full orchestra, choir and the rest.

So far, NTM has only been performed about 15 times since its 2007 debut in Toronto. And Mr. Idle and Mr. Du Prez, who will be conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic tonight and Saturday, have been expanding it. A couple of weeks ago, they added a leaf blower as an instrument.

"They are the most annoying things in the world," Mr. Idle said, "but we've managed to get a range of notes out of it."

So far, audiences and critics have not been annoyed. Last week's performance at Wolf Trap was hailed by The Washington Post as "hysterically funny ... a spectacularly loony idea."

"Part of the fun of that is that you're using a grand theme," Mr. Idle says. "So you got this mock heroic scale of it. When it starts, people go, 'Whoa!' because the volume of all this singing. The sheer power of it is quite something."

Mr. Idle says he has no intention of turning NTM into a Broadway musical like Spamalot. "It gives us some huge lovely gigs ... but we'll never make money out of it."

Los Angeles Daily News