‘Schmigadoon!’ Keeps Its Songs Intact as It Leaps from TV Screens to the Stage

It’s Musicals Week at IndieWire. With “Wicked” about to sparkle over theaters, we’re celebrating the best of the movie-musical genre. 

Season 1 of “Schmigadoon!” was a welcome bright spot in the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic when it premiered in July 2021. The relentlessly cheery homage to and gentle spoof of Golden Age Broadway musicals (think Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Brigadoon,” and “The Music Man”) was a throwback that also heralded a new voice in American musicals with Cinco Paul‘s infectious songs and witty scripts. But the experience wasn’t quite what Paul had in mind when Apple TV+ first greenlit the show.

“Shooting Season 1 wasn’t as fun as I’d hoped it to be,” Paul told IndieWire with a rueful laugh. “Pre-COVID, we were greenlit, and I was like, ‘It’ll be so fun, and we’ll hang out between takes.’ I had this image of it in my head, and it was not everybody double-masked, and nobody get near the actors. So, in that sense, it was not the theater kid dream experience I’d hoped it would be.”

Paul is quick to add that, of course, it still was, just in a different way. But now he’s getting that more communal experience with the second life of “Schmigadoon!”: A live stage adaptation is scheduled to premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in January 2025, directed and choreographed by the series’ Emmy-nominated choreographer Christopher Gattelli.

“It’s exciting!” Paul said of adapting the six episodes of Season 1 into a stage musical. “I thought it would be easier than it was. I initially thought, ‘OK, six half-hour episodes, I’ll cut a little bit and suddenly there’ll be a stage production.’ But turns out, they’re very different beasts. Initially, I plopped my Final Draft scripts, put them all together, and said, ‘Here it is, here’s a musical!’ And was quickly disabused of that notion.”

“Schmigadoon!” is just one of two musicals making the leap from screen to stage in the coming year. Although stage adaptations of films have become the norm (a tradition that actually dates back decades), adapting television series is far rarer, which makes the confluence of both “Schmigadoon!” premiering in D.C. and the stage version of NBC’s “Smash” coming to Broadway in March 2025 all the more striking. (The recent Broadway musical “Shucked” was technically an adaptation of “Hee-Haw,” but far less beholden to its source than these two.)

“I ran into [‘Smash’ and ‘Hairspray’ composer] Marc Shaiman at this Jerry Herman event, and we talked a little bit about, ‘Hey, we’re both turning TV shows into stage productions!'” Paul said. “I’m a massive fan of him and his work. ‘Hairspray’ is a musical I study all the time because I think it got so much right. We didn’t really talk in depth about our projects, but it was this acknowledgment. ‘Look at what we’re doing: TV shows into Broadway musicals!’ It’s about time.”

And while “Smash” sounds like it differs from the series, Paul assures fans of “Schmigadoon!” that the new version will only deepen the show. “It’s all of the songs from Season 1 — and I wrote three more,” he said, adding in true musical theater nerd fashion, “I had to cut some things, but just dialogue.”

The new version was also a chance to tweak some things Paul had never quite loved from the first iteration. “You finish it and turn it in, and think it’s perfect, and then a little later you realize, ‘I could have done that differently,'” he said. Some of those issues resulted from writing eight episodes but only filming six, forcing an ending that some viewers found rushed. “And I felt bad that Aaron Tveit’s character, Danny Bailey, kind of disappeared, so I found a way to bring him back that’s much more interesting and fun,” Paul said. “And I remember someone saying how much they loved the little romance between the mayor and the reverend, so I took that to heart, and I wrote them a song. It’s one of my new favorite things in the show.”

And while casting is still under wraps, the readings that the show has received assured Paul that there’s life in the show beyond the star-studded first season. “That was one of the great discoveries of the first reading we did, just reading through and the cast is just breaking up all the time,” he said. “I think this will be maybe even funnier on stage.”

Not bad for a project that first started with much lower ambitions. “Initially I did this adaptation because I wanted high schools to do it,” Paul said. “That was my dream! And then it went to [production house] Broadway Video, and they said, ‘Hm, I think there’s more than a high school future for this.’ So we kind of dreamed bigger, but ultimately, that would make me so happy for high schools to put on productions of ‘Schmigadoon!’ I will travel the country attending all of them!”

“Schmigadoon” will run at the Kennedy Center January 31–February 9, 2025.