The word "glee" has been bandied about quite a bit over the last season in pop culture, most probably because of the groundbreaking series of the same name on the Fox Network, which has made household names of Jane Lynch, Matthew Morrison, Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele and Chris Colfer, among others. It therefore, must have seemed a natural step for writer/composer/lyricist John Gregor and the Prospect Theater Company to name his latest musical opus With Glee, as a means of capitalizing on this new phenomenon.

Like so many million other schoolchildren from New York in the 1970s, your humble writer and his siblings would race home every day to watch "The Magic Garden," the daily half-hour TV show presented by co-hostesses Carole Demas and Paula Janis on WPIX-TV Channel 11; therein, the two took their throng of youthful spectators through a magical thirty minutes of song, stories, short plays, lessons about the world, and such characters as Sherlock the pink squirrel and Flapper the bird (both given virtual life by the great puppeteer Cary Antebi) as well as journeys with the Storybox, the Chucklepatch, and the Magic Tree growing lollipop sticks.