Song and dance promo

       As the autumn television season begins,and new and returning shows jostle one another to remind easily distracted viewers that they exist, there are many routes TV series can take to promote themselves. Some buy print ads and rent billboards; others use internet banners and viral videos. But probably only one is sending its cast on the road to perform a live musical.
       For the past several days the stars of the irreverent FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have been readying for a six-city tour. They will act, sing and karate kick their way through The Nightman Cometh , an original stage work taken from a recent episode of the show. Costumes and sets have been packed up, a tour bus has been prepared, and a few days ago some of the cast members even got together to rehearse for,like, four hours.
       Asked recently if he had the musical theatre background to pull this off, Rob McElhenney,the show's creator and co-star, gave a long, nervous laugh."No," he said."No. No, I don't. I don't really have any comedy background. This show is the first comedy I've done.
       "Now we're doing it in front of 4,000 people at a clip. It's going to be pretty interesting."
       This ad hoc, see-what-happens strategy has defined Always Sunny since FX signed McElhenney and two equally untested friends, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton, to produce and star in a series about a group of mates who run an Irish pub in South Philadelphia.
       Since its 2005 debut the show has developed a deliberately grimy, lowbrow comic sensibility consisting of naughty words, sexual innuendos and casual references to drug and alcohol abuse,as well as plots about get-rich-quick schemes,pranks gone wrong and internal rivalries.
       Following a third season story in which the tried fruitlessly to start a rock band, a fourth season episode revived one of their songs for a musical performed by the full Always Sunny cast, including Kaitlin Olson (who plays Howerton's sister) and Danny DeVito (who plays the siblings' father).
       In the context of the show this production is composed by Day's character, ostensibly telling the story of a boy who is transformed into a man by his love for a woman, and by the molestations of a bedroom invader called the Nightman.
       In real life it was written by McElhenney, Day and Howerton, with some musical help from a friend, the actor and musician Cormac Bluestone.McElhenney described the musical as "profound in its own sort of innocent ridiculousness".
       "We had never seen anything like that in a comedy before," he said,"possibly for good reason. But we decided to go for it anyway."
       In April the cast was invited by another musician friend, Don McCloskey, to sing some of the Nightman Cometh songs as part of his show at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood.But when event listings mistakenly said that the actors would be performing the entire musical - and two shows quickly sold out, based on this premise - the Always Sunny team agreed to give its devotees what they expected.
       Critics were sceptical that they could pull it off. Previewing the Troubadour shows for LA Weekly , Nicole Campos wrote that the cast of the "cranktastic" show "usually can't be bothered to take a spare breath when they aren't shouting put-downs at one another" and asked,"How would they stand still long enough to hit the high notes?"
       The actors recall these performances as scary and a bit sloppy but ultimately successful."As soon as you start singing in front of an audience full of fans," Olson said,"they're singing and screaming with you, so you can't really hear yourself. That was terrifying." But the overall production, she said, was "so stupid to me that it's fun".
       It also attracted the attention of the concert promoter Live Nation, which offered to take the show on a 22-city tour. This was not quite compatible with the schedule of the Always Sunny crew, which is still editing the final episodes of its coming season. But an abbreviated run was worked out, which began in Boston.
       The musical backgrounds of the Always Sunny stars are wildly disparate. Day's parents both hold doctorates in musicology, and his sister has a doctorate in choral conducting. Howerton, a Juilliard-trained actor, performed musical theatre in high school and college, while DeVito once serenaded Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Twins .Still, the performers agree that the road show is not only a great excuse to travel in a tour bus and fulfil their rock star fantasies, but also a validation of their series' unexpected success.
       "The whole thing is a total fluke," Howerton said."The first script I ever wrote in my life was an episode of the first season. Now all of a sudden we're writing a musical, and all because we talked some people into letting us do something that we didn't even totally know how to do."
       When the tour is complete, the cast will get a one-month break. Then the team must figure out how to top this stunt in future episodes of Always Sunny , which FX has renewed for two more seasons.