I’m a bad gay. I don’t like musicals. I am not a "Gleek" (though I am awestruck by "Glee’s" bold portraits of gay adolescent life  — I’d have given anything to watch a show like that when I was 15). I have trouble suspending disbelief when people spontaneously break into song; I get squirmy and my eyes dart around as if the singer is prancing naked in front of me, and I’m trying to give her privacy, whether or not she wants it.

So I am not exactly the ideal audience for "Smash," the new series NBC has been promoting like crazy (the pilot is already posted on Hulu), by playwright Theresa Rebeck ("The Understudy," "Seminar"), about the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. (That's this season. If the show gets renewed, we will watch another musical develop throughout the next season — a sort of musical-theater procedural. "Law & Order: The Musical!") The pilot opens with "American Idol" runner-up Katharine McPhee belting "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," daydreaming of her Broadway debut while auditioning before an underwhelmed director: For a curmudgeon like me, that has skin-crawl written all over it. Except that I was absolutely, instantly bewitched. By the writing. By the acting. By the story and the stories within the story. Even by — especially by — the music. That credit goes to the Tony-winning team Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman ("Hairspray"), who wrote more than a dozen original songs for the series, classically great musical-theater numbers that recall Jule Styne, even a little early Sondheim, and are performed only by those striving to be on the stage (no, Debra Messing will not break into song, nor will Anjelica Huston) — at auditions, or practiced at home, or in fantasy sequences — with lyrics that masterfully mirror both the theatrics of musical in progress and the goings-on of the actors’ lives.

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