Chicago Hope Does a Song 'n' Dance

  They sing; they dance; they hallucinate. They're the friendly doctors of Chicago Hope. Hard on the heels of ER's attention-grabbing, live season premiere, CBS's medic drama will be broadcasting its own unusual episode Wednesday night (10 p.m. ET/PT). But this "Brain Salad Surgery" hour, which has gestated for seven months, was not designed as a direct challenge to NBC's emergency room hit, producers say. It was originally conceived of for the end of last season, but proved a better fit early this fourth season, with a rested cast and more rehearsal time.

It features 10 musical numbers, some sung by the cast, including Adam Arkin and Mandy Patinkin, others from crooners Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra,'50s doo-woppers Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the harmony group The Lettermen, feminist warbler Helen Reddy, hippie balladeer Melanie and Jimi Hendrix. The episode was choreographed by Kenny Ortega (Dirty Dancing).

"We didn't audition any of our actors to see who could sing and who couldn't. We just put it out there and said 'This is what you are going to do now,' " explains executive producer and director Bill D'Elia, who emphasizes that the show is a drama with musical numbers, not a traditional musical. "My instruction to the cast was to take it very seriously, not editorialize and say, 'Hey, look, I'm a doctor and I'm dancing.' "

Dawn Prestwick and Nichole Yorkin wrote the script, inspired by the work of Dennis Potter, the late British TV dramatist who created The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven, in which characters' psychological and emotional traumas were expressed through nostalgic and popular songs. As Dr. Aaron Shutt (Arkin), suffering from a cerebral aneurysm--treated by the aptly named neurosurgeon Denise Potter (Tasha Smith)--hovers between life and death, his mind turns into a sort of jukebox of his 40 years, including his own childhood rendition of the Weavers' "When I'm on My Journey."

Arkin--whose acting dad Alan's group, the Tarriers, scored with "The Banana Boat Song" in 1957--recorded this song with the Babysitters (a folk group whose members included Pete Seeger and some of the Weavers) when he was 10 years old. The performance is resurrected (lip-synched by young lookalike, Ben Diskin) as Shutt recalls his bar mitzvah. Arkin also joins scrub-clad docs Mark Harmon, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Hector Elizondo on "Luck Be a Lady" from Guys & Dolls. The much better known vocalist, Broadway-singing Patinkin, recurring Dr. Jeffrey Geiger, performs "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bobbin' Along" and the Jacksons' "I'll Be There," which he plans to feature on his next album.

D'Elia says the supposed rivalry between his show and ER is more a product of media hype than reality. But he says other big conceptual episodes of his show are definitely in the works, joking, "If they can go back to live TV, we can go back even further to black and white. If they can do Jackie Gleason, we can do Charlie Chaplin."