In the pilot episode of “Glee,” the show choir director is fired after allegedly messing around with one of his students. His departure leaves an opening for green-eyed, golden-voiced Spanish teacher Will Schuester to step in and bring the almost defunct show choir back to its former glory.
The show’s creator, Ian Brennan, did not pull this anecdote from the depths of his tremendously fertile imagination. It actually happened, at his high school, to his former show choir coach, Jason Krigas. In 2006, the wildly popular coach was found guilty of having an improper relationship with a 17-year-old student and was sentenced to three years in jail.
Krigas remembers clearly the day Brennan phoned to say he was writing that story line into “Glee.”
“Ian called me and said, ‘Hey, I want you to know this is gonna be in the show,’ ” the former coach recalls. “He was like, ‘I’m sorry, man, but it’s too funny a bit not to use.’
“That’s Ian for you,” Krigas adds. “He can find a way to take an obviously touchy subject and make it funny. Frankly, if I were in his shoes, I would have done the same thing.”
This is the environment from which the smash series — a roadshow of which arrives at Radio City Music Hall for five concerts starting Friday — was spawned. Its mix of black comedy, self-conscious teen angst, and kitschy song-and-dance routines were inspired in part by Brennan’s time as a member of the Prospect High School show choir, in Mount Prospect, Ill., where Brennan was a student from 1992 to 1996.
Brennan now writes the show with Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy, who sang in the show choir at his school, too. Just like on the show, Brennan’s real-life glee club, called Mixed Company, was infinitely mockable, yet somehow cool, thanks in part to Krigas, who was also the school’s football coach and bridged the gap between drama kids and jocks. Brennan joined Mixed Company his sophomore year, mainly, he has said, to give him an advantage in getting roles in the school musicals, such as “The King and I,” in which he starred his senior year.
“I was in show choir for three years — we weren’t very good,” he tells the Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World. “That world [is] such a niche little microcosm of what a high school experience is — and what the American experience is, I guess.”
Brennan’s friend and former Mixed Company star Elizabeth Potter Isaak said although Brennan may shrug it off now, he was an ardent member of the show choir then.
“I read in interviews that Ian said he hated show choir, and I’m like, ‘Ian, you’re such a liar! You totally loved
it!’ ” says Isaak, who remains close with Brennan. “Maybe he didn’t really love it as much as I did, but I couldn’t tell at the time.”
Isaak, who insists she is not the inspiration for the uber-talented but scarily A-type character Rachel Berry, played by Lea Michele, does cop to taking Mixed Company pretty seriously.
“My mother made all the costumes,” says Isaak, now a mother of three. “There were a scary amount of sequins.”
Mixed Company further influenced the “Glee” choir, New Directions, in that it was also a meager troupe of a few dweeby drama souls when first formed by Krigas in 1992. In the show, a group of misfits and geeks sign up for the first rehearsal.
Isaak, Brennan and about a dozen other singers performed songs from “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at their first end-of-year show, Isaak says. “It was so pathetic. We wore denim shorts with tie-dyed T-shirts. We were a very sad-looking group, but we thought we were the best thing in the world.”
“Oh, they were absolutely the laughingstock of the school,” recalls Krigas’ wife, Amy, the troupe choreographer. She says Mixed Company’s first competition parallels the “Glee” scene in which New Directions competes against another school’s show choir, Vocal Adrenaline. New Directions watches, agog, as the troupe performs Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” as if they were playing Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.
“We were competing against a team from Clinton, Miss., who had been doing show choir for years,” Amy Krigas says. “They walked by us and, my God, they looked just like Barbie dolls with their long, blond, curly hair and their tanning-salon tans. The aura and the confidence that came off these people was so intense. Our kids stood there in their cheap, put-together costumes in shock.”
The coach told his kids to do their best and try to survive, which they did. But by the time Brennan and Isaak graduated, students actually had to try out to join the choir. (“Our first year, as long as you didn’t suck too hard, you got in,” says Isaak.)
Jason Krigas recalled almost falling out of his chair laughing at Brennan during one rehearsal. The group decided to learn sign language for the words to “All Good Gifts,” from “Godspell.” They were trying hard to be emotionally expressive with their faces while signing the words to the song and singing their hearts out.
“Ian was completely mocking the whole thing. I was just dying laughing but I didn’t want the other kids to see, because they were trying so hard,” he says. But when it came time to perform, Brennan was a pro.
“That was what was so great about Ian — he would make jokes in rehearsal but never at a show,” Krigas says. “He was such a great kid. A total joker and pain in the ass, but in the best way.”
Prospect High’s former theater director, John Marquette, who inspired “Glee” character Will Schuester, couldn’t be prouder. He recently saw Brennan win a Golden Globe for best comedy on the same night another Prospect grad, Jennifer Morrison
a k a Dr. Allison Cameron of “House M.D.,” was up for best drama.
“That’s like being an athletic coach and seeing two of your star players make it to the major leagues,” he says.
Brennan himself remains in awe of the transformation his high school years have gone through.
“It’s a weird kind of snake-eating-its-tail aspect for me to have come full circle from when I was in Mixed Company,” Brennan tells Tulsa World. “I was a cherub. I had the worst haircut and really bad T- zone issues, like a just greasy forehead, super skinny in an ill- fitting tuxedo and a sequined tie. And 15 years later, this would be happening? It’s all very, very strange and wonderful.”