‘Schmigadoon!’ review: Apple TV+, Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key take a bite out of Broadway, with love

Now streaming on Apple TV+, the six-episode “Schmigadoon!” starts out well enough as a one-joke idea that could go either way.

Then, happily, it goes the right way — beyond easy pastiche and surface parody of mid-20th century Broadway musicals, into a stealth level of emotional investment.

Its first two installments are set up by creators and co-writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio to win over the skeptics. Director Barry Sonnenfeld and the writing team, including Julie Klausner, Kate Gersten, Allison Silverman and Bowen Yang, lays out a gently satiric premise for people who don’t know “Oklahoma!” or “Brigadoon” from a hole in the ground.

Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key, both of whom honed their improv chops on stages in Chicago, play a New York City couple — doctors — whose relationship is stuck in neutral. She’s a Broadway aficionado; he hates musicals, which is reason enough to worry about their future together. While on a wilderness relationship retreat, they lose their way in a forest.

The mists clear, magically; on the other side of a twee-looking footbridge, Melissa and Josh find themselves in the village of Schmigadoon, where the townsfolk burst into song (in episode one, there’s a damnably hummable ode to corn pudding) and the primary characters are derived from Broadway archetypes, bent this way and that.

Josh’s romantic rival for Melissa’s affections emerges in the person of “carnival trash” Danny Bailey (Aaron Tveit), a riff on villainous Billy Bigelow of “Carousel.” Dove Cameron plays Betsy McDonough, a hot-to-trot soubrette of weirdly indeterminate age inspired by Ado Annie of “Oklahoma!” and Meg of “Brigadoon.”

The cast is full of Broadway ringers. Ariana DeBose, who originated the role of the Bullet in “Hamilton” and recently toned up the film version of Netflix’s “The Prom,” shines in the fourth episode, when her “Music Man”-derived character, the “spinster schoolmarm,” delivers a highlight of composer/lyricist Paul’s score — a schoolroom ode to perseverance and time steps.

Super charming, that routine blends a bit of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” from “Annie” with some of Bernadette Peters from “Pennies From Heaven,” a much darker investigation of the Broadway and Hollywood musical tradition. Kristin Chenoweth’s fearsome town scold goes to town on a “Music Man” tour de force that’s a little too close to “Trouble” for my tastes, but the execution’s tiptop.

For awhile, the cheery visual suffocation of “Schmigadoon!” is a mixed bag. It’s like a micro-edition of Main Street, USA, with no exit. Then the series expands its range of jokes and ideas, with the locals’ provincialism coming under serious scrutiny and critique (Strong’s Melissa is the running commentator par excellence). Painfully closeted characters, chiefly Alan Cumming’s Mayor Menlove, begin to reckon with their unhappy lives. Rewardingly, the future of Melissa and Josh is put to interesting tests, with prologues in each episode flashing back to where they were in their lives prior to this Broadway summer camp nightmare.

The show, in short, does what “Into the Woods” does with its fairy tale characters in terms of mashups and revisions. It starts out on a narrow path that widens, nicely. And if I ever get DeBose’s schoolroom tune “All of Your Heart” out of my head, it’ll be a bittersweet miracle.

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‘SCHMIGADOON!’

3 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-14

Running time: Approximately 3 hours (six half-hour episodes)

How to watch: First two episodes now streaming on Apple TV+; episode three premieres Friday.

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