”Python’s Spamalot” gets 14 Tony nominations

“Monty Python’s Spamalot,” a madcap medieval musical loosely based on the zany British troupe’s film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” led the field with 14 Tony nominations Tuesday, including best musical and bids for its King Arthur, Tim Curry, and Lancelot, Hank Azaria.

The musicals “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” about a couple of scam artists working the French Riviera, and “The Light in The Piazza,” the lushly romantic tale of love at first sight – and its ramifications – each had 11 nominations for Broadway’s highest honors.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning “Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s drama of uncertainty set against the backdrop of a Catholic school in the Bronx, received eight nominations.

The Tony Awards, with Hugh Jackman as host, will take place June 5 at Radio City Music Hall with a three-hour telecast by CBS.

The nominees in the best play category besides “Doubt” were “Democracy,” “Gem of the Ocean” and “The Pillowman.”

The off-Broadway sleeper hit that made it to Broadway – “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” – vies with “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “The Light in The Piazza” as best musical.

Christina Applegate, who still may be best known as a trampy teenager on the old sitcom “Married … With Children,” received a nomination for leading actress in a musical as the unlucky-in-love dance hall hostess in “Sweet Charity.”

She broke her right foot in March during the show’s Chicago tryout, and the Broadway production was canceled after its next stop, in Boston. But Applegate’s determination resurrected it.

The best revival of a play category pits “Virginia Woolf” against David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “On Golden Pond” and “Twelve Angry Men.” In the best revival of a musical category, “La Cage aux Folles” will compete with “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweet Charity.”