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Theater review: Schmigadoon!
Feb. 6th, 2025 07:06 amSaw Schmigadoon! at the Kennedy Center, a new stage musical adaptation of the eponymous short-lived Apple TV+ show, which is itself a parody of Golden Age musicals: NYC couple Josh and Melissa, whose relationship is on the outs, take a wrong turn on a hike, stumble across an old-timey town where everyone sings, and can't leave until they find True Love. (Their respective side romances on the way to realizing that True Love Was In Them All Along put Josh into the plot of The Music Man and Melissa into The Sound of Music.)
This show was SUCH a blast. Really great energy from the cast— I want to say especially the skirt-swishing, high-kicking, cartwheeling and backflipping ensemble, but then I keep thinking of all the individual actors who absolutely killed it with their respective Big Numbers; the most low-key (but still very funny) performance was, ironically, Alex Brightman as the musical-hating boyfriend, Josh, who spends most of the show looking increasingly martyred as people around him keep bursting into song— and from the audience, which was perhaps the most noisily engaged I've been in since actual audience participation improv show The Twenty-Sided Tavern. Cheers! Boos! Someone loudly saying "NO" in the most disgusted "you idiot" voice whenCaptain Von Trapp uptight widower Doc Lopez turns away a pregnant teenager, insisting that as a doctor "he can choose his own patients"! (It's okay— OBGYN Melissa helps the young couple, including with some belated sex ed to the tune of "Do Re Mi.")
I'm really glad I watched the TV show last weekend; it would have been just as entertaining to go into this completely blind, but I enjoyed seeing what stayed the same and what got changed between the show and stage. Broadly, the answer is that they cut out the flashbacks to Melissa and Josh's relationship - the musical starts with their vending machine meet-cute (here a set piece that immediately flips down into a bed) followed by a "SIX YEARS LATER" screen projection and the two of them arguing in the woods - and pretty much everything else was kept the same, other than some new songs (mostly added to replace a spoken scene, but sometimes swapped in for songs from the TV show— this video has a clip of Betsy's new song for the picnic scene) and one or two big plot changes:
( Biggest changes )
ETA: footage from the Kennedy Center!
This show was SUCH a blast. Really great energy from the cast— I want to say especially the skirt-swishing, high-kicking, cartwheeling and backflipping ensemble, but then I keep thinking of all the individual actors who absolutely killed it with their respective Big Numbers; the most low-key (but still very funny) performance was, ironically, Alex Brightman as the musical-hating boyfriend, Josh, who spends most of the show looking increasingly martyred as people around him keep bursting into song— and from the audience, which was perhaps the most noisily engaged I've been in since actual audience participation improv show The Twenty-Sided Tavern. Cheers! Boos! Someone loudly saying "NO" in the most disgusted "you idiot" voice when
I'm really glad I watched the TV show last weekend; it would have been just as entertaining to go into this completely blind, but I enjoyed seeing what stayed the same and what got changed between the show and stage. Broadly, the answer is that they cut out the flashbacks to Melissa and Josh's relationship - the musical starts with their vending machine meet-cute (here a set piece that immediately flips down into a bed) followed by a "SIX YEARS LATER" screen projection and the two of them arguing in the woods - and pretty much everything else was kept the same, other than some new songs (mostly added to replace a spoken scene, but sometimes swapped in for songs from the TV show— this video has a clip of Betsy's new song for the picnic scene) and one or two big plot changes:
( Biggest changes )
ETA: footage from the Kennedy Center!
