Scott Brown and Anthony King wanted to write a musical about the least conceivable subject possible. The New York theater nerds were inspired by the harebrained ideas other people were pitching for new shows - original stories and soundtracks with a loving, crafted-at-home feel, but proposed on a scale as epic as "Miss Saigon" or "Les Misérables." These musicals were grand in creators' minds, in contrast to the actual talent on display, Brown says.

"Just misconstrued and wrong ideas," King injects in a dual phone interview revealing the comedic fruits of a friendship hatched during a junior-high production of "Oliver!" in Durham, N.C. "Some of this grandiose folly was seeing its way onstage."

So with do-it-yourself flair, Brown, 31, and King, 32, began writing their own musical. Both men are writers and performers; Brown pens the regular Hit List column for Entertainment Weekly, while King is the artistic director of New York's Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

The nominal plot is about the inventor of the printing press, Johann Gutenberg, and his girlfriend - wait for the joke - Helvetica. The show is really about the enthusiasm of two earnest guys, Bud and Doug, who are acting out their little show, presenting it as if it's ready for the big time. "Chances are, if you don't know the person sitting beside you - they are probably a Broadway producer," Bud tells the audience in the musical's opening scene.

The two-man show features cardboard-box sets and trucker hats - 39 in all - to designate character changes. In 2004 and 2005, the writers performed the then-one-act regularly at the Upright Citizens Brigade; anything that didn't get laughs was rewritten immediately. After workshop performances at a musical-theater festival, a producer commissioned a second act and signed on to take the show to London.

"We were writing songs on the plane, basically," says King of the January 2006 opening. "Literally half the show had never been performed in front of an audience."

"We got to London and we were actually still making props ourselves, like a couple of second-graders," Brown adds.

Pressed into action: When Jerry Rapier saw the show last February during an extended off-Broadway run, the producing director of Salt Lake City's Plan-B Theatre Company fell in love with what he calls "its inspired silliness." Rapier thought the show was so fresh and funny, he didn't wait until the final curtain before starting to bring it to Utah.

In fact, he didn't even wait to see the second act; at intermission, he was already making phone calls, checking open dates at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center and then calling a friend-of-a-friend who worked on "Gutenberg!" to begin seeking rights to produce the show.

The show opens - with Jay Perry as Bud and Kirt Bateman as Doug - at the Rose's 77-seat Studio Theatre on Friday and will play a six-week run in the first production not overseen by its creators. Brown and King say there's another production opening this month in, of all places, Finland. There's talk of a national tour next year, and possible productions in Australia, maybe Wales. But, first, why Salt Lake City?

"We feel like not enough theater goes through Utah," jokes King, who claims familiarity with the state's rest stops.

"Plan-B was pretty persuasive," Brown says, which translates to: Rapier called at a time when the show's rights were coming available. "We applaud their childlike faith in our work."

Childlike - that's a description that could apply to Brown and King's show, which sends up musical theater in the spirit of Christopher Guest's 1997 mockumentary about community theater enthusiasts, "Waiting for Guffman."

Unlike "Urinetown" and other recent meta-musicals, Brown and King aimed to write a musical without the winking ironic tone so common in contemporary pop culture. "Because the guys who wrote it are also selling it," King says, "they're explaining everything they've done, so the show doesn't have to comment on itself. They're commenting on it."

Don't look too deep: Plan-B hopes the obvious, yet not condescending charm of "Gutenberg!" will prove widely accessible. After all, the show includes enough theater jokes to appeal to insiders, anchored by the kind of reach-for-the-stars dreaminess that fills out every indie filmmaker's backstory at the annual Sundance Film Festival.

"It's a very surfacey show," says Perry. "The characters are very broad and there's not a lot of depth. It's really just corny and fun and really light and sort of campy. It's a dream to play."

"When I read the play, I completely understood my character," says Bateman, Perry's onstage cohort. "He's a nerdy, musical-theater-loving dork, and that's just me. I'm completely playing myself."

Producing a silly musical comedy is itself something of a departure for a theater company notable for socially conscious, locally focused stories such as "Facing East," a play about the suicide of a gay Mormon man; "Alienation Effekt," a Brechtian satire about a state ban on gay clubs in high schools; and the recent "Exposed," about nuclear downwinders.

The Plan-B audience might need a laugh after the company's recent run of newsworthy dramas featuring suicides and deaths. "One of the main reasons for producing this show is to remind us not to take ourselves too seriously," Rapier says. "There is a dead baby in 'Gutenberg!', but it's hard to get emotionally invested when it's just the words - 'Dead Baby' - written on a trucker hat."

It might sound easy to juggle trucker hats, but still there's an art and a craft to the show's streamlined, effortless-appearing comedy.

"It's really hard to be genuinely funny without being greedy onstage, without forcing the audience to find you funny," says director Rapier. "This show, it's almost like it was written for us. It's very simply focused on two actors who are so strong they can play really poorly acted characters."

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* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Typecasting

* "GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL" plays Friday through Dec. 30 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center's Studio Theatre, 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City.

* TICKETS ARE $18 ($10 students), available by calling 801-355-ARTS or visiting www.planbtheatre.org/gutenberg. Not recommended for children under 12.