Moving their show to Broadway has meant that Jeff Bowen (left) and Hunter Bell are far too busy to really look at the camera.

There are many perfectly good ways to open a story about a musical. This may not be one of them. But the thing is, the musical in question is not just a musical. It's called “[title of show],” it just opened on Broadway, and it's a musical about the creation of a musical called “[title of show].” In other words, it's about itself.

This is the point in the article when an eminent source should say something like: “'[title of show]' reflects a fascinating trend on Broadway and maybe in theater as a whole right now. Shows like 'Passing Strange' and 'The Drowsy Chaperone' and 'Avenue Q' have not only broken from musical-theater conventions but have turned around to comment on and even poke some fun at those conventions. '[title of show]' seems to take that self-reflective impulse to the limit.”

Actually, that was my own pitch to my editor, who did not seem entirely convinced by the concept for this story about a story about a musical about a musical, but gave the go-ahead anyway.

But how do you start a story about a story about a musical about a musical? It is something that has never, ever been done before, at least according to Hunter Bell, who created “[title of show]” with Jeff Bowen.

“I don't know that it ever has,” as Bell put it when I mentioned the concept at the top of an interview at the Cafe Edison in Manhattan.

Hmmm. He sounds more tentative than I remember, now that I review the quote in my notes. Maybe he was just being polite. Maybe it was too noisy for me to hear correctly. Maybe I mistook his look of satisfaction with the matzo-ball soup for an expression of confidence in my story angle.

Maybe, if I rewind my mind to that mid-June day in that mid-Manhattan diner, a better start to the story will present itself. So. Back. Back

(Note to editor: Please insert print equivalent of the “wavy lines” they use to indicate flashbacks in movies. Also, please remember to delete this note.)

And here we are, talking to Bell and Bowen over lunch at this busy theater-crowd haunt.

It is, by their count, 33 days before the musical opens. (Though for us here in the future, it opened last Thursday, after beginning previews July 5. Isn't the future grand?) The two are explaining how “[title of show]” is a little like those old “backstage musicals” about putting on a show, except that the musical being put on is “[title of show].”

It began as a musical about having three weeks to write a show in time for the 2004 New York Musical Theater Festival. That version was created in three weeks, and did get into the festival. So then Bell and Bowen wrote a new version about landing the show off-Broadway, which also happened, in 2006.

Finally, they wrote a Broadway version of “[title of show],” which some producers (one of whom was behind such hits as “Rent, “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights”) brought to the big avenue in order for me to justify having lunch with these guys.

Bell, the show's book writer, and Bowen, its composer and lyricist, play characters named Hunter and Jeff – “a heightened version of us,” as Bell puts it. They star alongside Susan Blackwell (who plays Susan) and Heidi Blickenstaff (Heidi).

The musical's songs document the entire process of getting the show on its feet, from “Untitled Opening Number” (whose first lyrics are: A, D, D, D, D, F-sharp, A / will be the first notes of our show), through “An Original Musical” and “I Am Playing Me” to “Nine People's Favorite Thing,” a manifesto of artistic independence that invokes everything and everyone from Rice Krispies Treats to Comden and Green.

It all sounds slightly mad (and more than a little insider-y – Comden and Green?), but Bowen insists the show was never meant as a goof.

From the start, “we took it seriously,” he says. “We weren't doing it as a joke. That would've been sort of a waste of time. We became very interested in the idea of what we were writing, which was this challenge of trying to create something artistic for a festival, with a deadline. We thought that was an interesting plot.”

And that's the thing about “[title of show]”: To Bell and Bowen, it has a setting, just like any other musical. It just so happens that the setting is a musical. This musical.”

“I think, hopefully,” Bell starts – and then taps on the Formica for good luck – “if you have a good story that's compelling, it can be about anything. New York and theater is just the setting of what this is.

“I'm not a sassy black lady in a Motown group,” he adds, referring to the popular Broadway musical “South Pacific” (editor, please double-check this; might be “Dreamgirls”), “but I can watch that story, and I'm moved and emotional.”

And suddenly, what he says strikes me as eminently sensible and true: He is not a sassy black lady in a Motown group.

Maybe that's exactly the story lead I'm looking for.

As I listen, I find myself increasingly fascinated. By this pair's story, yes – but also by the fact the cafe we're sitting in is known jokingly as the Polish Tea Room, after the famed Russian Tea Room, a longtime gathering spot for theater types up on West 57th Street.

In other words, this is a restaurant about a restaurant.

Further, a play was actually set here once: Neil Simon's 2001 comedy “45 Seconds From Broadway.” And that work was sort of a play about a play: Its title riffs on “42 Seconds From Broadway,” a show that ran for about 42 seconds on Broadway (actually, for a single night, in 1973).

If Simon were here now, I wonder, would he write a play about an interview for a story about a story about a musical about a musical?

No, he'd probably be here to eat.

Clever transition here

And then, at a moment in the interview best described as “the top of my fourth page of notes,” something unscripted happens.

Bell is gesturing vigorously to someone behind me.

“I'm waving to Lin-Manuel Miranda,” he explains.

“He's here?” I ask, lamely (as if Bell would be waving to people not in the restaurant; Carmen Miranda, maybe, or Comden and Green). Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of “In the Heights,” the biggest new musical of the season?

It is him, and he comes to our table to kibitz with Bell and Bowen, buddies from when both “Heights” and “[title]” were being developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in 2005. I would congratulate him for the show's four Tony Awards (including best musical), except this is the day before the Tonys so I don't actually have that information yet.

Miranda apologizes for interrupting, but Bell waves him off: “This is totally giving us street cred,” he says.

“These guys are so street,” shoots back Miranda, whose show is set in a barrio of Washington Heights, not far from where he grew up. “I can't even begin to tell you. I'm terrified of them.”

He notes that his whole family is in town from Puerto Rico for the Tonys.

“I sort of came here to get away from them,” he says with a laugh.

“Don't print that,” says Bell.

“Yeah, don't print that,” says Miranda.

Of course I oblige.

When he leaves, Bell and Bowen talk more about their funny, long-running Youtube video series (known as “The '[title of show]' Show”), about their pre-opening nerves, and about some of the surprising responses to “[title of show].”

“So many people in the industry have said they're so happy we're making it, because they feel as though they've made it,” Bowen says. “They feel as though we're an example that anything's possible. It's sort of a validation, I think, for some people.

“Because '[title of show]' is about the art form of musical theater, (and) it takes that art form seriously.”

All of which is interesting; none of which strikes me as quite right, quite ringing enough for a story opening.

As we get up to leave, I convince the pair to pose for a cell-phone photo, against a backdrop of show posters tacked to the diner's wall. (As if that will ever get in the paper.)

Then, “I'm gonna go write,” Bell says.

Me, too. But how to begin?

Then, much later – or just now – I see something I had missed in my notes. Bell had asked Miranda if he thought the instrumental base of “[title of show]” – which features a single accompanist on piano – seemed substantial enough.

“Do you think we need more?” Bell wondered.

“Oh, no,” Miranda assured him. “You do you. That's how you got this far. That's how you will continue.”

A crisp, sincere, unbridled endorsement of following your own quirky little artistic heart, wherever it might lead. That's just the kind of sentiment a story like this should open with.

I'm going with it.

(As long as I got the quote right. Because the cafe was bustling. The dishes were clattering. The diners were chattering.)