‘Schmigadoon!’ Review: Musical Comedy as You’ve Never Seen It

It helps that “Schmigadoon!” is laughing at itself from the start, even before the romantically stalled-out Josh and Melissa go on their couples’ weekend, get caught in the rain and enter a town where “Show Boat” seems to have had a head-on collision with “Carousel.”Crossing an enchanted bridge into the title town, they’re welcomed by a bordering-on-hysterical “Oklahoma!”-meets-“Music Man” number performed by a mob of singing, dancing townsfolk dressed for a Taft-era ice-cream social. Melissa can’t resist. Josh can. We like her right away. Him? We’ll see.

The title, as the Broadway-literate will know, was inspired by “Brigadoon,” an early Lerner and Loewe collaboration that certainly isn’t the best-known entry in the canon but probably led to a better title than “Schmiddler on the Roof” or “Schmello, Dolly!” The “myth” of the original story—about a town that appears only every 100 years and exists in a perpetual past —also provides enough openings for series creators

Ken Daurio

and

Cinco Paul

to jam in references to dozens of productions, which are echoed, but never quite plagiarized, in the songs written by Mr. Paul. He does cut it close: When the chorus launches the opening number with an elongated “Schmiiiiii” one can imagine Rodgers and

Hammerstein

halfway to their lawyer’s office before “gadoon” sticks its landing somewhere other than “Oklahoma!”

There’s a lot of this, a lot of allusions to keep track of and some numbers that are spectacular as well as funny—the ambitious “Tribulation,” for instance, which features

Kristin Chenoweth

as

Mildred Layton,

the poisonous preacher’s wife who won’t let Josh and Melissa get a room together at the local hotel. (The era evoked, from the costumes to the morality, is mostly “Music Man” with a dash of “Li’l Abner.”) “You Can’t Tame Me” finds

Aaron Tveit

applying his beautiful voice to a song that might have sprung from

Billy Bigelow

in “Carousel,” but didn’t. The schoolmarm,

Emma Tate

(

Ariana DeBose

), leads her students through “With All Your Heart,” which is both exhilarating and a tap-dancing gag about the excesses of Broadway dance numbers. The whole cast seems to be involved in the joke-filled “Lovers’ Spat” (“Just because you’re feuding / Don’t mean that you’re concluding”).

Alan Cumming,

as the conflicted mayor,

Aloysius Menlove,

is like a Munchkin just back from “South Pacific.”

Spoofing the theater is hardly new. “Forbidden Broadway” hasbeen doing it, in one incarnation or another, since the ’80s. But the hook to “Schmigadoon!” is Melissa and Josh’s regular effort to steer matters back to their own reality. To pop the balloon. Why? It’s like Dorothy going back to Kansas. But by regularly acknowledging its own joke, “Schmigadoon!” wins.

Will Josh escape? He and Melissa are both doctors in an urban hospital who meet, fall in love and then their romance grows stale. The six-part story isn’t told chronologically—it flashes back to various stages in the relationship from the vantage point of Schmigadoon, where they’re stuck, in more ways than one: As the local leprechaun-cum-maitre-’d (Martin Short) informs them at the bridge, they can leave Schmigadoon only after finding true love. Aren’t they in love? Isn’t it true? Will they find what they need with someone else? And what is a demented Irish elf doing in a series inspired by a musical set in a fictional Scottish village? Making us laugh, something “Schmigadoon!” does with magical consistency.