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"Broadway Baby," from the landmark 1971 musical Follies, was Stephen Sondheim's valentine to every chorus kid with dreams of top billing. The new NBC series "Smash," about the trials of putting on a great big Broadway show, is about to give those kids their due.

The "Smash" dream team unites the best of Hollywood and Broadway producers, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg and Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who produced the film versions of Chicago and Hairspray and the current Broadway production of How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

"It used to be that 'theatre' was a dirty word on television," Meron says. "It was like you couldn't do politics on TV until 'West Wing' happened, and then there's a law you can't do theatre on TV. We felt it was time [to] explore this world as long as there was some universality and there were characters that the audience can engage with."

	Katharine McPhee in the pilot
	photo by Will Hart/NBC

Among those characters are a driven producer in search of her next hit project, played by Oscar-winning Hollywood royalty Anjelica Huston; a hit musical songwriting team played by Emmy winner Debra Messing ("Will & Grace") and Tony nominee Christian Borle (Legally Blonde); and two actresses (9 to 5 Drama Desk nominee Megan Hilty and "American Idol" contestant Katharine McPhee) competing for the same dream role.

"There are so many times I've stood backstage and thought, 'There need to be cameras here,'" says Hilty, who plays Ivy Lynn, a veteran Broadway chorus girl with her sights set on stardom. In "Smash" she goes belt-to-belt with fresh-faced newcomer Karen Cartwright (played by McPhee) as they compete to land the role of Marilyn Monroe in a new musical based on the buxom bombshell.

Akin to "Glee," which Meron and Zadan credit for opening the door to honest-to-goodness musical numbers on television, "Smash" will deliver character-driven songs (some culled from the pop charts) as well as original, show-stopping sequences from Marilyn. The goose bump-inducing new songs, like "Let Me Be Your Star," are by Shaiman and Wittman.

"We had to find a musical that the audience could drop in on at any moment and know what the story was," says lyricist Wittman. "And Marilyn, everyone's familiar with the blocks of [her] life story."

Rebeck adds, "The more time we spent with it, the more it became clear that not only would it actually make a fantastic musical, because she's so iconic and there's so many different, enormous arcs to her story, you could also make a great television show about people arguing about how to make a musical about Marilyn Monroe."