Go Figaro!

Image credit: Groban and Church: LP/WireImage.com

More flukes: Kelley, ''Ally McBeal'''s writer-producer, caught Groban performing ''The Prayer'' at a benefit and was impressed by how a noisy room shut up once the teen started singing; he wrote an ''Ally'' episode to climax with a similar scene where Groban silences his prom with his powerful pipes. ''We expanded his part once we realized he could act,'' says executive producer Bill D'Elia. ''I don't think even Josh realized he could act.'' Groban was brought back for a Christmas episode to sing ''To Where You Are,'' an afterlife anthem that has a way of reducing basso profundos to tears. The song's music video pictures him flashing back to a relationship with a girl so gorgeous she could only have died of fabulousness. But the ''Ally'' appearance was clearly intended as a national post-9/11 sob-along, and on a subsequent ''Larry King Live'' stint Groban's performance was overlaid with photos of the September fallen.

He's since been inundated with thankful notes from firemen and victims' families. Groban looks just cherubic enough that viewers might've wondered if Kelley was setting up a cradle-robbing subplot for Calista Flockhart; on Web message boards fans confess that when he first opened his mouth to sing on the show, they figured he'd been dubbed. ''That was flattering, that they didn't think, Okay, this guy's gotta be a singer, because his acting is so bad.''

He gets it all the time: The face doesn't go with the voice. He's going to need a thousand more cappuccinos to make that twain meet. ''Maybe one day I'll be huge -- I mean, physically huge -- and have to waddle out on stage.'' But for the moment, better to sound like a 300-pound guy than be a 300-pound guy. ''Yeah,'' he laughs. ''That's working for me right now.''