Looks terrific, right! And sort of intriguing that not every musical number will be strictly in the format of the club's performances. No, it looks as though we might get some Rob Marshall/Chicago-style fantasy songs. Which is fun! And fresh, for television. Hopefully High School Musical kids, now a little grown up, will appreciate this next step in their evolution.

Matthew Morrison (South Pacific at Lincoln Center) plays Will, a bored Spanish teacher with a materialistic shrew of a wife who gets a bit of divine inspiration one day and decides to become the new head of his school's once-proud, now fading show choir.

Lea Michele (a Julia Allison lookalike from Spring Awakening on Broadway) is the star singer, a less political and more musical Tracy Flick, and the adorrrrrable Corey Monteith is Finn, the aw-shucks football star with a secret passion for song. These two characters may sound a bit like cliches, and they are. But as livened up by sparkling writing and non-showy performances, these old archetypes seem suddenly shaded and complicated. Really, they seem new again. Whereas you can plug the same plot formula into any other number of let's-put-on-a-show high school stories and get basically the same results every time, Glee's first 43 minutes seemed to hint that the tale will unfold a little bit sideways, into the world of the weird. Think The Office set in high school and with, you know, really fun musical numbers ("Don't Stop Believin'" being a particular highlight last night).

The show is a definite gamble for Fox. It's gay as hula hoops, stars mostly unknowns (if you're not a theater nerd), and the second episode won't air until the fall. But if it pays off, something good and earnest (but not treacly) could bloom on a network that, sans the chintzy corporate glitz of American Idol, is in dire need of some cynicism antivenom. One hopes that where this show would sputter and quickly disappear on the more unforgiving ABC (the only other logical place on network TV for this kind of program), Fox—which seems to have slightly different ratings standards—will give it a longer runway. Other than song rights it can't cost much to produce. The actors are probably payed in collectible old Playbills! Because they're theatery!

But the show really isn't just for show queens, I promise.

Here embedded is the first episode. Put your work headphones on and give it a chance. Blow off the QED report and please watch it and tell other people to watch it.

I think you'll find that the title of the show says it all.

Elton John: I’ve got to try and write a film musical for Ben Stiller.

GQ: What’s that about?

Elton John:It’s about a guy on Broadway who is gay, has HIV and AIDS, and has to go back and face his wife and his kids that he left. It’s very funny.

GQ: It wasn’t sounding funny, so far.…

Elton John:No, it’s very funny. The premise doesn’t sound funny, but it is. All right?

We admit that we too are having trouble seeing the humor in the premise of an AIDS-sufferer facing down the family he abandoned to pursue the Broadway lifestyle. Once the material falls into Stiller's capable hands, however, we have no doubt he'll find the funny in soulful numbers featuring the supporting harmonies of Rescriptor, Sustiva, and Virmanune— a backup trio of doo-wopping pills-on-legs, better known as The Meds.

• Sir Elton John's Weird Third Act [GQ via Yahoo!]

OPEN SINGERS/ACTORS CALL FOR SPIDER-MAN A NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL Directed by Julie Taymor, Music and Lyrics by Bono and The Edge of U2

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR: Peter Parker: male, 16-20's, great Rock voice, can be nerdy with understated sex appeal, good sense of humor Mary Jane: female, 16-20's, beautiful girl next door, strong pop/rock singing voice Principal Woman: female, 25-35 years old, Amazing Rock vocals, think Sinead O'Connor with a Middle Eastern /Bulgarian/Greek/ twist. Foreign, world music types are great, foreign accents are great! All ethnicities.

JULY 28, 2008 10:00am-5pm THE KNITTING FACTORY NYC

Please prepare 16 bars of a pop/rock song that shows range. Please bring sheet music. Also a photo/resume stapled together, IF YOU HAVE ONE. IT'S COOL IF YOU DON'T! spidermancasting@gmail.com

We take their lax headshot requirements to mean that they are fully prepared to pluck a spider-in-the-rough from obscurity if they feel he's the right Peter Parker for the part. That said, there's no shortage of nerdy, understatedly sexy young men currently vying for roles on the Great White Way. Rather, it's the Bulgarian Women's Choir defectee they're hoping will fill the "Principal Woman" slot that might prove to be the bigger casting challenge. Once Bono gets a look at the available talent pool, he might ultimately have to settle for a Bashkortostanian throat singer to play villainous voodoo priestess Calypso instead.

• Previously: Spider-Man: The Musical! [Defamer]

• Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog Trailer [Slashfilm]

• Open Call Audition in Los Angeles Jume 20th [iwanttobeshrek.com]

Spider-Man has some of the most visually interesting villains in all of comics, and it will be a challenge for Taymor to deliver a viable stage adaptation of the mechanical tentacles of Doctor Octopus or the flying bat-glider of the Green Goblin. But the director did win Tonys for direction and costume design for the wildly popular adaptation of "The Lion King," which used puppetry, stilts, mechanically enhanced costumes and other tactics to create its complex vision of the jungle fable.

We imagine that no expense will be spared in helping Taymore realize her vision for the project (whatever that may be), and eventually we'll all be clamoring for tickets to watch superhero movie veteran and Broadway staple Hugh Jackman swinging to and fro on an elaborate system of pulleys created especially for the production, belting out Bono's musical interpretation of Peter Parker's trademark one-liners, and battling villains in exquisitely bedazzled spandex. And if the following video of some early, computer-modeled choreography is to be trusted, the dancing will be just as spectacular as its other inevitably top-notch elements:

• Spider-Man is spinning his web toward Broadway [LAT]

Sorkin's reps confirmed on Tuesday (March 20) that the West Wing creator has officially signed on to write the musical's script. ''Maybe that means they'll need to build a stage with lots of hallways on it,'' joked Coyne of Sorkin's fondness for walking-and-talking characters. ''It will be a giant tube that's always moving!'' [...]

Coyne compares the proposed concept to Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi movie Brazil. ''There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world,'' explains Coyne. ''This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.''

While an "Illicit Mushrooms"-Era Sorkin may have connected with the Lips' trippy source material in a satisfying way, in the hands of his current killjoy incarnation, the hallucinatory tale of romantic entanglements and terminally ill Japanese warriors could quickly devolve into a preachy mess, filled with self-righteous monologues delivered by doctors lamenting the mismanagement of the giant, pink automatons who control the health care system.

• Sorkin Will Script Flaming Lips Musical [EW.com]