LOS ANGELES – Even before the first season of “Schmigadoon!” finished filming, co-creator Cinco Paul started planting seeds for the second.
He told Dove Cameron she’d be like Sally Bowles, Ariana DeBose, she’d become a “Cabaret”-like emcee. The goal was to bring the musical theater spoof into another era – this time, the musicals of the 1960s and 70s.
“Musicals got darker (during the era),” Paul says. “They don’t have happy endings and they’re more complicated.”
To reflect that: the two leads happen upon Schmicago, where problems can’t be solved with a good ballad. Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key return as the doctors who found love in Schmigadoon, the town where Rodgers and Hammerstein-like dance numbers thrived.
Many of the first season’s actors are back, albeit in new roles. Tony winner Aaron Tveit, for example, isn’t the dock worker who pines for a girlfriend, he’s the “Hair”-level hippie who believes in free love. Kristin Chenoweth isn’t the uptight puritan affecting town sentiment, she’s a Mrs. Lovett-level businesswoman.
“It was really a dream come true,” says Cameron. “This (era) is what inspired me to get involved in musical theater in the first place. In general, I don’t get to play darker characters as often as I would like.”
Realizing as much, Paul crafted her character –a Sally Bowles-like singer who revels in heartache. “We were always trying to find the balance between really pushing it to the point where she’s nauseating to be around to (a place where) you have a lot of empathy for her,” Cameron says. “It was a lot of fun.”
To pull off those “Cabaret”-like dance moves, choreographer Christopher Gattelli taught her “a lot of chair-dance, chair-ography and hat-ography,” she says.
“We got to do a lot of fun tricks, but it was definitely difficult. The hardest dancing belongs to our incredible company.”
To hit touchstones in his tour through the ‘60s and ‘70s, Paul looked for songs audiences might recognize. The opening number, he says, is based on “Magic To Do” from “Pippin.” “And then it usually evolves,” he says. “As I get deeper in the season, I start to feel a little more original. Instead of a show about people trapped in a musical, it becomes a genuine musical.”
To get to the point of creativity, Paul sits at a piano and plays all of the scores he’s likely to reference, “just so I can get them in my bones.” Last season, his Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute, “Corn Puddin’,” won an Emmy for Outstanding Music and Lyrics.
In the second season, Key says, there are references to songs from the first season.
Two newcomers – Tituss Burgess and Patrick Page – get to evoke characters from “Pippin” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Musicals, as a result, cover a wide range of styles – from Kander and Ebb’s Ragtime feel for “Chicago” to Stephen Sondheim’s operatic “Sweeney Todd.”
“Everybody has a lot of affection for the ‘40s and ‘50s musicals, but I think people particularly feel passionate about these musicals,” Paul says.
“Schmigadoon!” season two begins April 5 on AppleTV+.
