Glee-Cap Ep. 2: Watch the Show, Read the Recap, Get Obsessed!
If you haven’t jumped on the Glee bandwagon, it’s time to join the club. Glee, which premiered in May, is now a part of the competitive fall lineup of new TV offerings. It seems the hour-long high school musical was tailor-made for what Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker lovingly dubbed “theater geeks” (right, that’s us) at the 2003 Tony Awards. With Broadway vets Matthew Morrison (Hairspray, The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific) and Lea Michele (Spring Awakening) leading the cast, we know Glee can sing. But does it soar? To quote Jane Lynch’s hilariously caustic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, “Let’s break it down.”
Morrison stars as Will Schuester, a crush-worthy Spanish teacher with his sensitive heart set on getting William McKinley High’s pathetic glee club back to its glory (like when he “took nationals back in ‘93”—way to nab the demographic). This week’s show brought him obstacle numero uno in what will surely be a weekly series of complications: getting the requisite number of students needed for regional competition—12 rather than the current “five and a half” counting the “cripple in the wheelchair” as Lynch’s coach Sylvester points out to Mr. Shue in a nasty vs. nice face-off.
With a line not once uttered by one of my high school teachers—“How about a little Kanye?”—Mr. Shue gets the glee kids revved up in rehearsal for the big school assembly, where they will (hopefully) win over some new recruits. With their rendition of “Gold Digger,” the show suddenly transforms from cute and glib to, “Get down, girl. Go ‘head, get down.” Yeah, they went there—especially Morrison. And it totally worked.
The song, by the way, offers a not-too-subtle commentary on Will’s annoyingly entitled wife, Terri, who is house-shopping and expecting a new addition to the Shuester family—or is she? (Think Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without the boozy all-nighter.) To keep up with Terri’s materialistic desires, Will takes on extra work as a nighttime janitor at school. This, in turn, becomes perfect for running into Emma, a swooning guidance counselor with a bad case of OCD and the hots (for Will, of course). Did we mention that when Will’s wife learns she is having a hysterical pregnancy, she plans on telling him over a late supper, but instead it somehow comes out that “it’s a boy”? Stay tuned for more on this romantic (and very lopsided) triangle.
There are more lopsided triangles to Glee. The student body has more on its mind than cheerleading and choreography. (No, not algebra.) They have sex on the brain. Hello? They’re teenagers. Rachel (played by Michele, no stranger to pouting and pining after her star turn on Broadway in the sex-angst musical Spring Awakening) wants it all: to be the star of the glee club, to be younger and thinner (she makes an attempt at bulimia but is somehow missing a gag reflex), and she has a thing for talented quarterback Finn (played by Cory Monteith). Rachel ends up (after a silly Xerox misfire) at a meeting for the school’s celibacy club, led by popular cheerleader, Quinn (Finn’s gf, obviously), a bitchy blonde worthy of Wicked’s Glinda. Once again, Rachel becomes an outcast. She explains that it’s not just the boys who are interested in the opposite sex. Wha? OMG!
Though Rachel’s remark doesn’t win her any points with the celibate-friendly group, it does win the attention of Finn (how could it not?) and leads to a make-out session on (where else?) the stage. Things are, uh, cut short when Finn hilariously conjures up that time he ran over the mailman in an attempt not to “erupt early.” Got it? Good. Anyway, the event inspires Rachel to really wow the crowd at the big assembly and pick up some new recruits with a saucy rendition of Salt n Pepa’s “Push It” rather than the disco tune that Will had planned for the glee club. Needless to say, the school erupted… in cheers. (Coach Sylvester was appalled, of course. "That was the most offensive thing I've seen in 20 years of teaching,” she cracks, “and that includes an elementary school production of Hair.") OK, so Mr. Shue wasn’t exactly thrilled that his glee kids went behind his back, but he has got to be psyched that they are on their way to something big.
And so is Glee.