Triple-threat Cinco Paul clearly loves what he wrote for the first season of “Schmigadoon!,” the Apple TV series produced by Lorne Michaels of “SNL” fame. With his book, lyrics and music, Paul might have been in another room, if not another space-time compendium, when the transfer from television to the stage took place to bring “Schmigadoon!” to Broadway, where it opened Monday at the Nederlander Theatre.
The major difference between the TV show and the Broadway musical is that one appears on a small screen and the other has live actors. Less significant, Christopher Gattelli replaces Barry Sonnenfeld as director, although the former remains on board as choreographer.
In 2024, Gattelli successfully revamped “Death Becomes Her” for the stage, with help from book writer Marco Pennette and songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey — none of whom had anything to do with the 1992 film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by David Koepp and Martin Donovan.
“Schmigadoon!” on stage is no “Death Becomes Her.” It is a photo-copy replica of the TV show’s first season, in which two doctors from New York go on a camping trip in the Catskills, only to end up in a musical comprised of songs and plot points from famous shows of the 1940s and ’50s, most specifically “Carousel,” “The Music Man” and, of course, “Brigadoon.” The running joke is that while Dr. Melissa Gimble likes musicals, Dr. Josh Skinner can’t stand them and has to roll his eyes and make snide comments whenever anyone dances or breaks into song, which is often.
Cinco Paul hasn’t so much parodied Meredith Willson, Lerner & Loewe and Rodgers & Hammerstein. He has copied them. The humor comes from our recognizing the matchup. Gee, doesn’t “Tribulation” from “Schmigadoon!” sound just like “Trouble” from “The Music Man”? After that singular thrill has quickly evaporated, there is the two doctors’ spoken commentary about the absurdity of people singing on stage when people in real life never do that. In other words, theatergoers are being asked to pay multiple times their monthly Apple subscription to enjoy that joke live. Repeatedly.
Playing the doctors, Alex Brightman and Sara Chase are a marginal improvement on their TV doppelgängers; they bring a nice, relaxed quality to a show that is otherwise hyper without being rousing.
A couple of featured actors also manage to charm. Maulik Pancholy delivers an absolutely adorable Reverend Layton. The best performance comes late in the show; Afra Hines plays Countess Gabriele Von Blerkom, a character who is supposed to be the baroness from “The Sound of Music.” Rather than replicating Eleanor Parker’s performance from the 1965 movie, Hines does a spot-on impersonation of Carrie Coon’s nouveau-riche bitch from “The Gilded Age.”
