Stephen Collins is getting ready to make his return to Broadway after 14 years, and it’s a long way from “7th Heaven.” He’s brushing up his upper crusty British accent and taking over the role of King Arthur in “Spamalot,” beginning June 24.  The assignment couldn’t come at a better time.

“It’s such supreme silliness, I can’t help laughing any time I bury my head in the script.  It’s wonderfully antidotal,” says Stephen, who admits he’s still shaken by the death of his father last month at age 90.

Collins says that his family was together and “It could not have been a more peaceful and un-traumatic passing.”  He also notes, “I got in to New York to see him the night before he died…I had the intuition that I should be there…”

He had been in New Orleans for a round of meetings about his July 12-airing Hallmark Channel rodeo-themed movie, “Every Second Counts” when he felt the need to hop a flight for New York.  At the same time, he was on the AFTRA negotiating committee that just hammered out a contractual agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers last week — though as things turned out, he was only able to be involved during the final couple of days of negotiations.

Stephen says he actually met with Nichols about “Spamalot” last fall, and the revered director gave him the chance to take on the show – but at the time, family considerations prevented him from doing so.  Nichols promised to get back to Collins, and “Mike, bless him, was true to his word.  It’s a miracle.”

Now plans call for him to do “Spamalot” into mid-September, which will also give Collins the opportunity to spend time with his newly-widowed mom.  He’ll take a couple of days away from the show to help his and wife Faye Grant’s only child, daughter Kate, make the move to university life in North Carolina.

“It’s a turbulent period, but in a good way,” he says of the move.  “This is just such an extraordinary time.”

GETTING HISTORICAL: David Morse reports being steeped in the birth of America’s 13 colonies in HBO’s critically-lauded “John Adams” miniseries gave him insight into today’s potboiler political climate. “Everything we see right now between the Republicans and Democrats – how cheap they can get, how vicious they can get – was right there at the beginning,” says Morse, who plays General George Washington in the mini, due out on DVD June 10.

“In ‘John Adams’ you see where the parties were formed.” Morse, who did extensive research for his role, says “Washington thought it was going to be the end of everything they fought for, these two parties, same thing with John Adams. It was so divided even in Washington’s own cabinet and that was the beginning of the divide we see today. I’d done something a while ago on Abraham Lincoln and I knew that as much as we know Lincoln was a great man, he could get really dirty himself. I think that was just the way that game has always been played, which is a shame.”

Morse — on the horn from London where he’s shooting the big-screen “Shanghai” with John Cusack — says of his “John Adams” leads Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney (who shines as Abigail Adams), “they both blew my mind. I know Paul and I’ve worked with him before. But he probably took on one of the most daunting and awesome roles ever written for an actor with the journey he has to go on from 36 to 90…the words he has to speak, the ideas, the emotions. It was a truly awesome thing”

THE SMALL SCREEN SCENE: “Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons says when the CBS sitcom returns for its second season he hopes audiences will get to see a little more of the heart than the mind of his brainiac character, Sheldon Cooper.

That’s “just because it’s been so out of the loop and norm of what we’ve seen Sheldon do,” says Parsons, who’s garnered notice as a breakout talent for portrayal of a physicist with two PhDs and a masters degree on the show also starring Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco. “We did one episode I really enjoyed where Sheldon got kicked off the physics team and I felt anger, hurt as Sheldon. It caught me by surprise when we were doing the scene.  Sheldon doesn’t let himself get angry or hurt too often. He’s got such a magnificent faculty in looking at things scientifically he doesn’t necessarily feel things. So something that forces him into that unstable ground of emotions is fun. I wouldn’t mind doing more of that.”

DO THE MATH: When something that helps kids catches on, it’s a good thing.  When something that helps kids turns into a phenomenon, all the better!  Now “Smart Shorties Hip Hop Multiplication” is yielding a movie – set to go into production in July in Brooklyn.  Smart Shorties creators Christine Smith and Alex Nesmith tell us they’re hoping some of the talents whose beats are used in their fun math tunes will cameo in the movie – names such as T-Pain and Rich Boy

Smith, a Toledo, Ohio schoolteacher when she started searching for a better way to get her 4th to 7th graders cued into math, joined forces with Atlanta, Ga., music producer Nesmith on the project just a couple of years ago. They knew they were onto something huge when their Twelve’s Tables song was featured on local news, then picked up by “Good Morning America” – and then the website Smith had set up for her students was suddenly inundated with “109,000 views, and people writing in, ‘How can we get this?’” she recalls.  The requests came from as far as Australia.

Nesmith, who’s worked with a number of leading acts, sounds as if he’s found his calling with Smart Shorties, “a great new challenge for me.  I fell in love with the kids right away.”

Smart Shorties (smartshorties.com) comic books, Spanish language raps and other projects are now also in the works – along with compilations of improved test scores for students learning with the songs.