'Schmigadoon!' star Kristin Chenoweth says she nailed a 4-minute solo with no cuts on the first take
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Kristin Chenoweth said that the "Schmigadoon!" team nailed a difficult song with no cuts on the first take.
Chenoweth's solo "Tribulation" in the AppleTV+ series' fifth episode is four minutes long and has no rhymes.
Chenoweth said she learned the song by practising over and over whilst watching "90-day fiancé."
Kristin Chenoweth told Insider that her four-minute solo in "Schmigadoon!" was filmed perfectly in one shot on the first take.
The award-winning actress said that although they filmed the big number three times, the "Schmigadoon!" director, Barry Sonnenfeld, ended up using the first take.
"If one person messes up we go back to the beginning so everybody in the ensemble was looking at me like, 'We're not going to mess up.' We were there together," she said. "After the first take, the big old Mildred banner came down and he [Sonnenfeld] yelled cut and everyone cheered because we knew we did it. When we got done Barry goes let's just do another one because we can. So we did it three times and the actual one in the show was the very first time we did it."
According to production notes for the AppleTV+ series, Sonnenfeld wanted as much of the singing to be done live as possible, including Chenoweth's solo "Tribulation" in the fifth episode of the series.
"Tribulation" is particularly difficult because it is lengthy and none of the words rhyme.
The Broadway star told Insider that she laughed when Sonnenfeld told her that she was going to do such a difficult song in one shot.
She said: "When Barry Sonnenfeld called me. He said, 'I want to do an 18-pager and I want to do it in one [shot].' I started laughing and then he said 'You can. You can.'"
"I knew it would be a challenge at this point in my career," she added. "Sonnenfeld knows that I still want to be challenged and he handed it to me. It was so fun and so hard but so rewarding."
Chenoweth said that during her quarantine before filming, she learned the song by practicing over and over whilst on an elliptical machine and watching "90-day fiancé."
Chenoweth stars in the musical-comedy series as a morally-shrewd Christian, Mildred Layton, who attempts to guilt-trip the townspeople of Schmigadoon into being as morally pure as herself.
"Schmigadoon!" parodies the golden age of musicals, which are a set of famous musicals made in the mid 20th century such as "The Sound of Music," "Oklahoma!" and "Guys and Dolls." Chenoweth's song particularly is parodying "Ya Got Trouble" from "The Music Man." Coincidentally, the Tony award-winning actress starred in the movie version of "The Music Man" in 2003.
Read the original article on Insider
