Melissa (Cecily Strong) and Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) have reached an impasse in their relationship. When Josh reluctantly agrees to a backpacking retreat meant to help them find their way back to each other, they stumble into Schmigadoon, an 1950s-ish town where everybody sings and dances like they’re in a Golden Age musical. To escape Schmigadoon, Josh and Melissa will need true love, but they’re not sure anymore if that’s what they share. To make matters worse, while Melissa is bemused by the strange townspeople’s proclivity for launching into musical numbers, it’s some kind of personal hell for Josh, who despairs at one point, “It’s like if The Walking Dead was Glee.”
Schmigadoon! plays most aggressively to those whose musical theater knowledge borders on the encyclopedic. For one, the title and concept of the series derive loosely from Brigadoon, the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical about a Scottish village cursed to appear for only one day every hundred years. While the greatest asset of Schmigadoon! is its affection for esoterica, that’s also the reason that the Apple TV+ program may have trouble converting the musical theater skeptic into a connoisseur. After all, the best joke in the series hinges on the fact that Oscar Hammerstein II’s “Soliloquy” lyric in Carousel has some silly redundancies.
Schmigadoon! nails the bloomer-ruffling choreography of musicals like Brigadoon and Oklahoma!, not to mention the laughably fake painted backdrops used in so many musical films when the genre was at its peak. Composer Cinco Paul’s tunes are consistently evocative of the music they seek to emulate, but they aren’t particularly pointed in their parody. If Paul is disdainful of the musical’s “golden age” sound, the series is only reverential. Schmigadoon!, in fact, employed two of the best orchestrators in the business, Doug Besterman and David Chase, so the music sounds lush and bountiful, even when the songs are silly.
But while Schmigadoon! walks and talks like a musical, it doesn’t hold up, structurally, as a television series. Split into six slim episodes, its entire running time is well under three hours—about the duration of a Golden Age musical—and there’s not much rhyme or reason to where the breaks occur. The resulting choppiness often decelerates the momentum of the series and diminishes the fun of the characters’ whirligig relationships.
Strong and Key make a likeable couple who maintain a caustic tenderness even as they cheat on each other with the locals. The songs keep coming and coming—the gag is that Melissa and Josh know they’re all singing, but the villagers don’t—and Schmigadoon! relishes in the goofy, occasionally touching ways that the pair venture toward finding their own voices.
The series is jam-packed with theater and comedy guest stars, from Kristin Chenoweth as the forbidding, puritanical minister’s wife who leads a patter song reminiscent of The Music Man’s “Trouble,” to Ariana DeBose, a fast-rising star of musical film adaptations like The Prom, as a whip-smart, formidable reimagining of The Music Man’s Marian Paroo, who provides the suddenly smitten Josh with the tools to change for the better. And Ann Harada, best known for Avenue Q, plays the clueless wife of the not-so-subtly-named Mayor Menlove (Alan Cumming), delivering a confused torch song, “He’s a Queer One, That Man O’ Mine,” while surrounded by her husband’s collection of erotic gay sculpture.
Like that stale-on-arrival joke, there isn’t much bite to the show’s initially jokey jabs at American musical theater. By the time we reach a joyous Annie-inspired soft-shoe number and the inevitably affecting finale, it isn’t poking fun at the musical form so much as paying homage. But even if Schmigadoon! is a little too tonally messy to take a consistent position on whether Golden Age musicals are masterpieces or guilty pleasures or stale chestnuts, maybe that’s part of the point. By the end of the show’s frenzied arc, the love story that emerges most charmingly is that of a parody falling hard for the subject it intended to satirize.
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