In practice room H245, second floor behind the theatre, across an arched promenade, every weekday night from 7 to 10 p.m., a class of twenty-two actors study their lines, shuffle the wood-panel floors and sing songs that go like this. Along with their coach and instructors, they are preparing for ECC’s Spring Musical: Spamalot; the Tony Award-winning, Chicago-born Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” of the 1975 motion picture, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The two-act show stages in England 932 A.D., a divided kingdom where there is 50 percent chance of pestilence and famine. The story, narrated by a haughty historian, travels along with King Arthur and his servant Patsy, who acts as Arthur’s steed by imitating bouncing hooves through the clapping of two halves of a coconut.

Together, they recruit several misfit knights across the land of Britons. These knights include the dashingly handsome Sir Galahad, strangely flatulent Sir Bedevere, homicidally brave Sir Lancelot, the not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot Sir Robin and Sir Not-Appearing, who exits sheepishly after a swift appearance.

Preceding a quick stint in Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table are approached by God’s feet, who bestow a mission upon the fellowship to find the Holy Grail, and thus set them on their journey.

So far, in production the cast are frolic and their energy is perennial, as the aroma of dirty British humour stuffs the air. Settling in the corner of the dance space, guardian John G. Slawson, the artistic and musical director, conducts the musical number “Knights of the Round Table,” through the lively slamming of his piano; his hands are focused as his mind travels through each measure of the number.

“The music is very upbeat, almost pop music; very musical theater,” Slawson said about his 45^th ECC production. “Just about every song has a dance number – a lot of energy – never standing around… It’s creative and it’s crazy, but that’s art, there’s no science.”

Slawson takes delight in the unserious tone the tunes own, and enjoys their peppy attribution to the humour that will feed back into the audience. The cast and accompaniment will perform about 26 contemporary-musical-theater based songs, and only a few of those are bridges and instrumentals. Some are slow, but most are vigorous and hysterical, poking fun at stereotypes and Broadway formulas.

Although the production is light-hearted, the cast seem ready to win a war. Each knight wields a pair of sharpened tap-shoes, and once Slawson begins to stab at the keys, King Arthur rejoices in the sight of drinking maids and twirls their bodies carefully through his arms, ‘what happens in Camelot stays in Camelot’ he cheers as the other men howl and clap. Quickly, several knights bash the heels and toes of their instrumental feet, tirelessly tapping in sync to each other, some on ground-level, others on massive dice cubes grasping giant poker chips; sweat drops appear from their foreheads. Arthur may be faking his tip-toe abilities through Patsy’s coconuts, but these knights are wild, boisterous, and nevertheless talented. Slawson gratifies the director and choreographer of the production, Konnie Kay, for their dancing capabilities.

“Great teacher. She teaches people who don’t dance, and teaches them pretty difficult routines, and gets them to bleed,” said Slawson.

This is Kay’s 24^th ECC production, but she has been in this community theater since the 80’s where she started working in theater groups that performed here, along with her husband, Bill Sherry, who stars as King Arthur in this production. The duo has no resting bone in their body. The business of entertainment flows through them intravenously, and has even been inherited by their children. Kay teaches theater dance at ECC, and adores how the style builds with character and story. She gets to pull the teeth out of not only inexperienced dancers, but also practiced and professional ones in order to make them loosen up. Kay explained her love for doing productions with affluent dance numbers, as it transcribes from the actors’ teamwork and belief in each other.

“The best thing about this show is the teamwork that I feel,” Kay said. “We try to instill [it] in everybody here in the show, whether you’re the lead or whether you’re the third girl from the left, this is all a team. And come opening night, there’s gonna be a piece of artwork that’s gonna be made by thirty people. I love that feeling; that thought. It’s a piece of art that we all did the brushstrokes on.”

Teamwork was cast a large role in this production, as these twenty-two actors must fill the position of sixty-eight roles. There are about eight leads, and only one of them is female. The rest of the cast pick up those remaining numbers through ensembles, feature dancers, taunting Frenchies, not-yet-dead peasants, Laker girls and Knights of Ni. Kaylee Hofman, the Vice President of Performing Arts Club at ECC, plays various flavors of commitments, ranging from a not-yet-dead bride, a can-can girl, a Laker girl and a Knight of Ni, who are covered in a furry cloak with antlers protruding from their bucketed helmets. She is excited to play inside this ensemble, where she can perform diverse roles and immediate costume changes, sporting pom-poms in one scene and a rotting corpse in the next.

“We do have one costume change that’s about fifteen seconds,” Hofman said.

The lone female lead, Lady of the Lake, is played by Kelley Calpin, and is one of the glaring differences between the motion picture and the play. Throughout the performance, she has to transform herself by not only costume, but musical style as well. During the course of the show, she sings traditional musical theater, operatic musical theater , gospel, jazz and belt. Every time she visits the knights, she’s a different version of herself. It’s a hard job to stay versatile, but it’s the comedy of the music that helps drive meaning into the scattered plot and character development.

“It’s a show that is not afraid to be ridiculous in itself, some comedies try to take themselves a little too seriously,” Calpin said. “This is one is just, balls out funny… To do a show like this you have to kind of be willing to put yourself out there and look like an idiot.”

On the stage of the Blizzard Theater, the characters dance and perform in front of an environmentally cautious Stone Keep Castle. The bricks are manipulated with foam panels and Styrofoam packing material, plastic bottle cases help create windowed lookouts, and the entrance of the castle is a garage door. Large oak trees get their light-brown color from cardboard, as green recycled plastic bags provide leaves and bushes. Tanya Moore, the set manager and production coordinator, borrowed the unit set from the Metropolis Theater in Arlington Heights, IL. Moore, on her forty-first ECC production, is focused on strictly entertainment, having fun and handing the audience an escape.

Kay, the director, is also focusing on broadcasting the comic flavor of Spamalot, which fuses the antics of Monty Python and the spectacle of Broadway.

“I think this is a very different show that we’re doing because we don’t usually do big,” Kay said. “Even though this is a musical, this is a different kind of a comedy. This is an English comedy and it has a different flare to it and we’ve never done one that’s quite this pratfall. This is vaudeville raw, which is different for us.”

The show will perform at the Blizzard Theater between Feb. 20 to 28, on Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. The last show will be 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 28. Ticket fees are $18 for students and seniors, and $20 for adults.