John Cleese is adapting The Life of Brian as a non-musical stage play. I love the Pythons so much that I'm willing to give them a pass on the endless recycling of their old material. It feels like we've had eighty repackagings of the TV show sketches for home video, each striving to look more definitive than the one before. That stuff is priceless and if the men who made it can make more gelt from it, fine.
And I did really enjoy Spamalot. My first reaction when I heard about it was the same as when a local theatrical group was putting on a show of old Monty Python material: Who wants to see performers who are not John Cleese, Eric Idle, et al, doing those routines? But Spamalot was a great show. I've seen three different productions of it and loved 'em all. I gather though that Mr. Cleese is not planning on changing The Life of Brian for his stage production as much as Mr. Idle changed Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was a lot, incorporating all sorts of other Python bits.
For instance, Cleese is now denying rumors that he's cutting the "Loretta" scene — the one about the man who wants to be a woman — because it might offend people. Given the attention lately about "trans" people and the inhumane attempts to marginalize or persecute them, it could now be viewed in a different light. To me, the relevant question is not "Will it offend audiences?" It's "Is it still funny?"
And a key word in this discussion is "might." Comedy is not unaffected by changes in our society. For instance, I think jokes about drunks (Foster Brooks, for example) and potheads (Cheech & Chong) are not as laugh-provoking to most folks today as they were in the sixties and seventies. That may or may not be regrettable but the world does change and some humor turns out to have a short shelf life. Nixon jokes aren't as hysterical as they were in 1970 either.
Cleese should feel free to leave it in to see how it fares before audiences. Not that my opinion matters but I think they'll love it.
But he should also feel free to cut it, not because it "might" offend someone but if it turns out it just plain doesn't work or is too expendable. Cutting something because it definitely offends people is not always the right move anyway…and cutting something because it "might" is even more foolish. In rehearsals and outta-town tryouts, a lot of material was cut from Spamalot because it didn't make the audience laugh and/or was making the evening too long. Some of that was probably hilarious when the Pythons themselves performed it decades earlier.
And in case I need to make this clear: I think the way to deal with folks who wish to swap genders is to leave them alone to do whatever they want. Let them be what their hearts tell them they were meant to be. Let them use the public restroom of their choice. And especially stop trying to score cheap political points at their expense. If you honestly feel threatened by their very existence, I think you need to transition from whatever the hell it is you are into a human being.