Delivers Love Letter to Musicals

It’s tempting to argue on precept that “Schmigadoon!” is every little thing that’s flawed with Broadway: a double-baked potato of acquainted IP that depends on affection for a TV collection, which itself depends on affection for golden age musicals. But the effervescent stage present, from creator Cinco Paul and director-choreographer Christoper Gattelli, is all however irresistible — a giddy love letter to the type that’s sufficient to flip even the most skeptical curmudgeon right into a strolling heart-eye emoji.

Start out a stick in the mud, and also you’ll have Alex Brightman as your stand-in. The Tony-winning “Beetlejuice” alum performs the straight-man foil to the swirl of inventory characters that greet him and his girlfriend, performed by Sara Chase, after they stumble right into a magical city — the place all of life is a musical — after getting misplaced on a Catskills {couples}’ retreat. The only manner again to their native New York City is, after all, to discover true love.

That they’ll finally rediscover each other is clear, which suggests their dalliances alongside the manner with numerous romantic leads from the American songbook want to ship on leisure worth alone. “Schmigadoon!” doesn’t just need the couple to fall for each other again — it needs audiences to fall in love with the American musical in all its sincerity, absurdity, and cringeworthiness.

Paul, who co-created the Apple TV+ collection and drew from season one for the musical’s script and score, performs a dexterous trick, poking enjoyable at the type’s many ridiculous tropes with an unmistakably affectionate hand. Together with Gattelli, the pair are keenly conscious of what makes a musical tick — and why people love, or love to hate them — leveraging a lot of it to their benefit.

Almost instantly, Chase’s character — a doctor again dwelling, however a damsel out right here — catches the eye of a carnival barker (a unbelievable Max Clayton) who’s all brawn and broad smiles and straight out of “Carousel.” Brightman’s cynic is meanwhile a magnet for the city’s country-fried jailbait (McKenzie Kurtz), plucked from “Oklahoma!” Look out behind her! There’s daddy with a shotgun.

The city also has a pied piper of the purity police (Ana Gasteyer, in peak type) and a light-in-his-loafers mayor (Brad Oscar), who has a conveniently daft spouse (Ann Harada, reprising her function from the collection). While not precisely a feminist screed, the script grants nary a free go to the glut of hackneyed gender conventions in the golden-age canon without a minimum of cracking a joke. The overexaggerated femininity, in Linda Cho’s frosting-on-an-Easter-cake costumes, is its personal winking critique.

The coronary heart of the story is the bond between the IRL couple, and it has been drawn in finer element since the present’s try-out last 12 months at the Kennedy Center, the place I discovered it thinly sketched. Additional materials in the script, and deepened work from the actors, now lends an emotional cost to the will-they-or-won’t-they plot, despite the apparent glad ending to-be. Chase is a heat and wry powerhouse as a musical-theater geek still glad to drag her beloved artform’s dated faults. And Brightman, who’s constructed a popularity playing wilder roles, exhibits his vary by going straightfaced as the sourpuss fish out of water. Not just in distinction to the hijinks round them, the two really feel grounded and price rooting for.

Gattelli, who also choreographed the TV collection, does a lot of his best work right here via dance, a hypervigorous storm of limbs that manages to be humorous while conveying story and character. Together with the candy-colored, pop-up-book design (the set is by Scott Pask and lighting by Donald Holder), there’s a topline sense of frenzied too-muchness always prepared the viewers into submission.

This being a Lorne Michaels manufacturing, there are also well-timed punch traces in all places — in the lyrics, the tone, the staging, and in the blinking arrow that says “fun” and factors to a hunky bachelor’s crotch. But the plot also retains a serial high quality that saps momentum and betrays its TV roots. The couple tries out one set of lovers in the first act, then another — “The Music Man”-coded schoolmarm (Isabelle McCalla) and “The Sound of Music”-inspired doctor (Ivan Hernandez) — in the second. By the time intermission hits, you may virtually hear the writers’ room mapping out a season’s price of episodes.

It’s no knock to say that you may go away the theater buzzing well-known tunes from other exhibits, so uncannily does Paul evoke beloved songwriting types without replicating actual melodies. Just as the story mines humor from the collision of old school methods with a contemporary frankness, Paul’s score combines the enchantment of jaunty golden-age sounds with a freshness that feels current day.

Not that anybody needs to assume about the current day. The concept in “Schmigadoon!” of a literal portal via which to escape actuality is undoubtedly a part of its enchantment. Even musical-theater haters would have to ask, why even hassle making an attempt to come again?