When reading the word “Schmicago,” there is only one thing a person can do: burst out laughing.
“It’s so stupid, right?” Tituss Burgess tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “It’s just so fun.”
“I think we all kind of feel like we’re getting away with murder,” his co-star Dove Cameron says. “I think we all feel like this show shouldn’t exist, and it’s because of some strange crack in the matrix that it came together at all.”
That show would be Schmigadoon!, the musical comedy satire, by way of homage, whose second season premiered this week on Apple TV+. The series stars stage veterans-turned-screen favorites like Burgess, Cameron, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Aaron Tveit, Ariana DeBose, and Jane Krakowski, alongside sketch-comedy icons Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key. (The collective number of Tonys, Emmys, and Oscars won by this cast would make a trophy case collapse.)
The person who chiseled that crack is Cinco Paul, the co-creator of Schmigadoon and writer of its original songs, who funneled through that matrix the vibrant, unusual, song-and-dance-filled first season of the show.
Melissa (Strong) and Josh (Key) were a couple whose relationship had lost its spark. After weathering both a literal and metaphorical emotional storm while on an outdoor retreat meant to reconnect them, they stumbled upon a moss-lined cobblestone bridge. They nervously crossed it into the oversaturated, brightly-lit rolling hills of Schmigadoon. With their petticoats, parasols, and plastered smiles, the town’s population seemed like entertainers at a theme park meant to recreate the spirit of the Golden Age musicals from the ’40s and ’50s, like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and, of course, Brigadoon.
Only, the townspeople weren’t performing; this was their reality. Cameron was playing a version of Ado Annie, DeBose a Marian the Librarian, and Tveitt a Billy Bigelow, each performing songs inspired by those classic musicals—and having their lives thrown into a tailspin by the “woke” norms of the modern-day interlopers. (In one number, Melissa educates the town’s young women on sexual health, in a tune reminiscent of The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi.”)
The show managed to both be nostalgic and lovingly subvert the problematic themes and blindspots (especially when it comes to diversity and gender) of those productions that have become a part of Americana. It also acutely revealed how music and art can shepherd us towards the best, most inclusive versions of ourselves.
To the average viewer, Schmigadoon! was sharp and funny. To musical theater obsessives (this writer raises his jazz hand and shuffles off to Buffalo), it was unbelievable that the show even existed.
“My favorite thing to hear is when someone says, ‘This feels like this show was written just for me,’” Paul says. “That’s the highest compliment because, to be honest, I just wrote the show that I would most want to see.”
Strong, whose impressive singing voice was often shown off during her tenure on Saturday Night Live, agrees. “That’s a good group of people that it’s specifically tailored to. I think that’s a fun crowd to be in.”
Whatever that crack in the matrix may have been in Season 1 has now become a full-on gorge, following the seismically absurdist and delightful unveiling of Schmigadoon! Season 2. This time, the show takes place—get ready to laugh again—in the new fictional universe of Schmicago.
After reconnecting through the magic of Schmigadoon and pledging a fresh start back in the real world, Melissa and Josh find themselves in another rut. They’re struggling to start a family. Their careers are at a monotonous standstill. They think: Shouldn’t we be happier? So they head back to the forest in an attempt to find Schmigadoon and the solution to their problems. Instead, they arrive at Schmicago, where people are again spontaneously breaking out into song while dressed in iconic costumes from famous Broadway shows—only this time, everything seems darker.
The bucolic setting, barn-raising choreography, and erstwhile cheeriness of Schmigadoon has been replaced by bowler hats, Fosse fingers, and murder. We’re now entrenched in the musical theater of the ’60s and ’70s, albeit with the same faces from Schmigadoon occupying new roles.
“We kind of joked while filming Season 1, ‘How do we get to come back together? Maybe Season 2 could be like the next era of musicals,’” Tveit says. “And then that’s what we got to do.” Jaime Camil, who has also been a part of both seasons, jokes, “I just felt ecstatic to be employed again.”
In Schmicago, Burgess arrives as narrator, channeling The Leading Player from Pippin. Cameron is Jenny, a version of Sally Bowles from Cabaret, while Cumming and Chenoweth invoke the leads from Sweeney Todd, with Chenoweth inflecting her Mrs. Lovett with shades of Miss Hannigan from Annie.
Tveitt is belting songs inspired by Pippin and Godspell, all while styled with the afro and hippie garb of a character from Hair—he enthusiastically bellows, “Who wants to get naked?” In one show-stopping number, Krakowski channels just about every character from Chicago, while the town’s women alternately perform dances reminiscent of Sweet Charity, A Chorus Line, and Cabaret’s Kit Kat Club.
For much of the cast, getting to delve into these musicals was a dream. “These are the decades that I grew up watching and that influenced me so heavily,” Krakowski says. “Especially the female leads of the musicals of the time: the Fosse women, Gwen Verndon and Chita Rivera; A Chorus Line; Ann Reinking. All these women that were not the ingenues, who were quirky.”
But this new concept was also, at face value, outrageous—ridiculous, even, to the point that it should have been impossible.
Whereas the musicals Schmigadoon! Season 1 sent up all had similar Rodgers & Hammerstein-style music and near-identical sets and costumes, the musicals of the ’60s and ’70s were much more aesthetically diverse. There were Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, and Stephen Schwartz, all with disparate musical styles. As for time period, the late-1800s world of Sweeney Todd might as well be a different planet from the roaring ’20s of Chicago, let alone Hair’s late-’60s free-love vibes.
The result is a mash-up of musical theater iconography that will delight Broadway aficionados, while making their heads spin faster than a chorus boy’s triple pirouette.
Take one number, for example, where Cameron, dressed in flapper-era black with a blunt bob—like Liza Minnelli by way of Chicago’s Velma Kelly—dances with the Hair-inspired hippies, while singing a number in the style of Godspell. “Being on set and seeing two background people, and one’s dressed with the white face and a bowler, and one's dressed like a hippie … was just fun to see,” Strong says.
“We decided in the writers room to embrace and create three different worlds, which is the Chicago world, the Sweeney Todd Victorian world, and then that ’60s world,” Paul says. “[We said,] let’s create them separately, and then let’s find ways to have Josh and Melissa pull these characters together. And wouldn’t it be fun if Pippin and Sally Bowles fell in love? What if Miss Hannigan and Sweeney Todd fell in love? These are the things that got us all really excited.”
“It makes me laugh so hard,” says Ann Harada, who plays the proprietor of Schmicago’s cabaret club. “I’m just so delighted to see the way Cinco’s brain can mash up different things, like Mrs. Lovett is also Miss Hannigan, which is great. And it makes it now you’re able to have kids in a number and then get rid of them.”
About that number in particular, which is performed by Chenoweth, Krakowski is still in awe: “Why has no one done that before? Now I can never unsee this.”
But no one has done it before, because it shouldn’t really work. How would anyone even think of something like this in the first place? And even once this idea of combining all of these renowned characters into one universe crystallizes, how do you craft a season of a series that makes sense narratively and has the necessary emotional stakes?
Paul admits that he had always conceived of Schmigadoon! as having multiple seasons, traveling through multiple eras. What he couldn’t nail down, though, was what Melissa and Josh’s journey would be—how they would even get to Schmicago in the first place.
“When I found out we got a Season 2, I dove into all those musicals and then it became so clear to me: none of them have happy endings,” he says. “They’re much darker. Wouldn’t it be great if Josh and Melissa are trying to get back to Schmigadoon because there’s not enough happiness in the real world, but they can’t get there and end up in Schmicago instead? Now they have to find a happy ending in a place that has no happy ending, which is what the world we live in is.”
The idea of that was thrilling, Key says. “What a concept to think about: What is happiness? There’s so much depth and complexity.”
It’s something that they found resounded in “even just where we are in life, making these shows,” Strong says.
After all, Season 1 was both filmed and aired during different traumatic periods of the pandemic.
“I think the first season was just such an escape, and was a much-needed, like, ‘let’s run away to this colorful place,’” she says. “And now we’ve all been sitting in this new, sometimes starker reality, and you start to feel the weight of that. I think these two people are feeling the weight of the world. Now, how do you deal with that if you can’t just run to a Schmigadoon and escape it? How do we all find happiness with the realities of our real lives, especially with what everyone’s been through?”
Schmigadoon! is great art about great art that has always asked these questions, framing them in a modern way that makes us think about them in new, hopefully enlightening ways—and, as the show makes great effort to do, with great humor, too.
It’s no wonder that the series is able to assemble a cast as booked-and-busy as this one, both on the stage and on screen. (DeBose, for example, won an Oscar between Seasons 1 and 2. “Arianna moved heaven and Earth so that she could do this again,” Paul says.) And they’re all raring to go for more, be it The Schmantom of the Opera, Schmats, Schmicked, Schment, or whatever era of theater Paul tackles next.
As Harada sums up: “I’m hoping that we become a Schmigadoon multiverse.”
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