Jonathan Storm: A teen musical for adults

Lillian Adler, may she rest in peace, took the McKinley High show choir (or whatever you call it) to the championship back in '93. Her picture's right there in the trophy case, along with the big loving cup. She looks just like what a glee-club adviser should look like.

The plaque by her picture reads: "By its very definition, glee is about giving up yourself to joy."

Glee, the new Fox dramedy premiering tonight after the American Idol finals, is also about giving yourself up to joy, if not by its very definition. Showing the soft side of executive producer Ryan Murphy, the twisted mind behind FX's Nip/Tuck, it's funny, inspiring, and full of music. When the current crop of McKinley misfits gets it all together at the end tonight, you may find a tear or two trailing down your cheek.

I did, and not just because they were killing with Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" (yep, the one from the end of The Sopranos), which is one of my favorite songs (even though the boy in it would be Canadian if he were really born and raised in South Detroit), which is why I'm not a rock critic.

I was teary also because, like the kids in the glee club, Glee is a marvelous misfit that is just as likely to get tossed in the Dumpster because the cruel world doesn't understand it as it is to be embraced for its inspiration.

It's High School Musical for grown-ups, which doesn't mean, necessarily, that teens and tweens will tune out, but does mean that themes of marital ennui, career failure, and petty politics mix into a high school environment that is a good deal meaner than the overgrown Mickey Mouse Club of HSM's East High.

The show features Broadway veterans (though they look wet behind the ears), not teenage heartthrobs (though the lead boy is very handsome). So the characters are richer and the singing and dancing more effective than those in the Disney franchise.

Fox employs a unique presentation with Glee. After premiering tonight at 9 (or 9:02 or whenever it is that the live Idol Adam vs. Chris throwdown ends), Glee won't be back till fall.

The network loves the show, and it knows it won't have a bigger audience hanging around to check it out until next winter. It also hopes people are so taken with tonight's pilot that buzz will build all summer to explode when the show starts running as a series.

Fresh from South Pacific, and slightly less fresh from his Tony nom for The Light in the Piazza, Matthew Morrison stars as Will Schuester, the teacher who's driven to take over the glee club when the previous mentor, played by Stephen Tobolowsky (one of Hollywood's coolest), retires for greener - literally - economic pastures.

When Principal Figgins, hilariously venal, unempathetic, and played by Iqbal Theba, moves to throw the club out of the auditorium, Schuester makes a deal that if his motley crew can make like Mötley Crüe and win in competition, they get to keep their practice space.

Figgins would rather rent it to the local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. "There's lots of drunks in this town," he says. "They're paying $10 a head."

Using questionable tactics, Schuester forces the cool-guy high school quarterback, who has a great voice, to join the sub-basement band of losers in the glee club. He'll stay on the football team, too. "You can't win without me," he tells his jock teammate, "and neither can they."

Lea Michele, 22, who hit Broadway when she was 8 as little Cosette in Les Miz, powers the club vocally and spiritually as Rachel Berry, perhaps the most hated outlier in the school, who always affixes a gold star to her signature because she knows she's a star even if nobody else does.

The club also has a guitar virtuoso in a wheelchair, a boy soprano, and two power-vocalist females who have issues about singing backup. Amber Riley, who plays one of them, has performed with the Los Angeles Opera. Jenna Ushkowitz, the other, performed on Broadway with Michele in Spring Awakening.

They're making a big effort here, folks.

Like a lot of high schools under the guidance of creative TV types, this one is a battlefield for your heart and the embarrassment capital of the world (as Angela Chase, the quintessential angst-ridden teen, would say). But it's also peppered with spark plugs, firecrackers, little engines that can, and some surprising music clearances. The defending glee champs, for example, have a field day with Amy Winehouse's "Rehab."

Glee is a yes, yes, yes of a show. A lot of folks have their fingers crossed for this one.

Glee

Premieres tonight at 9 on Fox29