The Purple Piano Project

"The Purple Piano Project"

"The Purple Piano Project" is the premiere episode of the third season of the American musical television series Glee, and the 45th overall. It was written by series co-creator Brad Falchuk, directed by Eric Stoltz, and aired on Fox in the United States on September 20, 2011. The episode featured the start of a new school year at McKinley High, and for its glee club, New Directions.

Plot

It's a new year at McKinley High. New Directions glee club director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays) are now sharing an apartment and a bed. Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), coach of the Cheerios cheerleading squad, is running for Congress but doing badly in the polls. Glee club member Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.) is now a senior, while his girlfriend Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz) and fellow club member Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale) note that they are juniors. Club co-captain Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith), a senior, has no idea what to do about his future. Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) has a new boyfriend (LaMarcus Tinker); her former boyfriend Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet) moved when his long-unemployed father found a job out-of-state. He is one of three New Directions members who have left the club. The other two are Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink), who broke up with Puck (Mark Salling) and left New Directions because it was hurting her reputation, and Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) who after the heartbreak of the previous season has completely reinvented herself with pink hair, a nose ring, and a tattoo, taken up smoking, and has made friends with a group of angry girls called the Skanks. She rejects the attempt of Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) and Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris), who have rejoined the Cheerios, to get her to rejoin with them, and also Rachel Berry's (Lea Michele) urgings to come back to the glee club.

To recruit new talent, Will places several purple pianos around the school and encourages the club to sing whenever they see one. When Mike and Tina play on one in a hallway, Sue interrupts them by snapping the piano strings with wire cutters, and is praised for doing so by an arts-hating teacher (Barbara Tarbuck), who promises to vote for her. An inspired Sue goes on television and vows that, if elected, she will cut all funding for the arts until all students read at or above grade level. She makes Santana and Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter) cheerleading co-captains, to their mutual disgust, and makes them pledge to help her sabotage the glee club. After New Directions performs "We Got the Beat" in the lunch room, Becky starts a food fight that targets the club. After lunch, Sugar Motta (Vanessa Lengies) auditions, but cannot sing in tune, forcing Will to choose between being inclusive or doing whatever it takes to win the show choir competitions. He eventually rejects Sugar, but gains a new recruit anyway when Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) convinces his boyfriend Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss) to transfer from Dalton Academy.

Kurt and Rachel see Emma about their plans for college in New York City. She suggests they consider a well-respected school for the dramatic arts there, and the two of them attend an area "mixer" for students interested in applying. They rehearse "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead", expecting to overawe the other attendees, but are instead intimidated by their performance of a medley of "Anything Goes" and "Anything You Can Do", led by Harmony (Lindsay Pearce). Although shaken, and almost ready to give up their dreams, they each vow not to let the other do so. This leads to Rachel announcing that the school musical will be West Side Story, and Kurt announcing a run for Senior Class President.

Blaine sings "It's Not Unusual" to a large crowd of students in the school courtyard while a growing number of Cheerios, led by Santana, act as his back-up dancers. As the number is ending, the Cheerios dance around one of the purple pianos, and each sprinkles lighter fluid on it. Quinn flicks her lit cigarette onto the piano, and it bursts into flames. Will correctly blames Santana for organizing the sabotage and bans her from New Directions, leaving the glee club with only ten members: Rachel, Mercedes, Tina, Brittany, Finn, Kurt, Artie, Puck, Mike, and Blaine. Rachel breaks up the resulting pity party by singing the opening to "You Can't Stop the Beat", and they all perform the song in the auditorium, while Quinn watches from above.

Production

The first day of filming for the episode was August 9, 2011, though some cast members were called the day before to begin recording musical numbers. Murphy realized that The Glee Project runner-up Lindsay Pearce would be ideal for an already-written role in the episode, but the filming needed to take place before the project's finale was broadcast on August 21, 2011, revealing that she had won a two-episode prize. They "kept delaying" the shoot, and snuck her into a soundstage to make sure no one recognized her. In aid of this secrecy, her name was omitted from the Fox press release for the episode. Once he'd cast Pearce, he made the musical number she was to appear in bigger. According to Michele, the filming of the first episode ended on August 19, 2011.

Returning recurring guest stars appearing in the episode include ex-glee club member Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink), Principal Figgins (Iqbal Theba), football coach Shannon Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones), cheerleader Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter), school reporter Jacob Ben Israel (Josh Sussman), and television anchors Rod Remington (Bill A. Jones) and Andrea Carmichael (Earlene Davis). Three new recurring characters were introduced: football player Shane (LaMarcus Tinker), who is the new boyfriend of Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), student Sugar Motta (Vanessa Lengies) and Pearce as Harmony. Effective with this episode, former recurring guest stars Harry Shum, Jr. as Mike Chang and Darren Criss as Blaine Anderson join the main cast, while Jessalyn Gilsig and Mike O'Malley, who play Will's wife Terri Schuester and Kurt's father Burt Hummel respectively, are no longer credited as part of the main cast. Gilsig played Will's wife Terri Schuester in the first two seasons, and her change had been previously reported. O'Malley's had not, but he is listed in the Fox press releases for the second and third episodes as being a guest star, his credit in the first season. Barbara Tarbuck guest starred as Nancy Bletheim, a geometry teacher at McKinley.

At the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con International on July 24, 2011, series creator Brad Falchuk said that in the first episode of the third season, "The opening sequence is everybody saying what they want to do when they grow up, so you see everyone's anxieties." He also stated, "Come the first episode back, you see who the seniors and juniors are."

The episode features seven musical cover versions. Two are in the form of a mash-up of "Anything Goes" from the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes and "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun, with the lead sung by Pearce. The other five are "You Can't Stop the Beat" from the musical Hairspray and "We Got the Beat" by The Go-Gos, both performed by New Directions; "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" from the film The Wizard of Oz (as performed by Barbra Streisand and Harold Arlen from Streisand's Duets album), sung by Michele and Colfer; the Tom Jones song "It's Not Unusual" features Criss; and "Big Spender" from the musical Sweet Charity, performed by Lengies. All songs, except for "Big Spender," were released as singles, available for digital download.