Schmigadoon! (S2, E1-4)
After the frothy small town warmth and romance, with some ne’er-do-well plotting in there too of course, of season one of Schmigadoon! (a delightful send-up of the musical film Brigadoon, the fondly-realised homage to musicals return with a second season that takes a decidedly darker turn.
Now reflecting the edgier themes of musicals such as Cabaret, Sweeney Todd and Chicago from the 1960s and 1970s that explored the societal malaise that followed on the heels of the initial postwar sense of a world forever changed for the better (spoiler: it wasn’t), Schmigadoon! aka Schmicago sees our intrepid doctors from the real world, Melissa Gamble (Cecily Strong) and Josh Skinner (Keegan-Michael Key) return back to the make believe world of musicals after real life turns out to be not as happiness-inducing as they’d hoped.
Sure, they’ve fallen back in love, gotten married, found a renewed love for their jobs but that only lasts so long and one night, followed some deeply personal trauma best left to the viewing of the second season, they decide they need the effervescent, technicolour, all-singing, all dancing joy that only Schmigadoon! can supply.
But rather than getting all that 1940s and 1950s vivacious buzz, what they get, and what it turns out they need, is the darker musical vibe of later decades which understood that not everyone gets happy endings and that sometimes life, is bleak and awful and sliding into soul-searing oblivion.
Fun, huh?
Well, amazingly, it still is; thanks to the fact that Cinco Paul, who writes all the songs and came up with the original idea for the show some 20 years before its premiere, and Ken Daurio are still helming the show, Schmicago, which is how we’ll refer to the second season from this point on, still has a rich, very human vibrancy to it.
Assisting with that unexpected sense of comedic and musical buoyancy is the fact that the Narrator, played by the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt‘s Titus Burgess in all his irrepressibly sardonic glory, adds some much-needed flamboyance to proceedings and that Melissa and Josh, though more worldly wise when it comes to living in a musical, still have the role of being the cynics and quippers about how odd it all is.
They react precisely as many of us would, first in shock that they’ve wandered into far darker musicals territory than they were expecting, and then with determination to find the happy ending, ill-defined and hard to quantify thus making the finish line hard to find, which will send them back home.
It’s there that Schmicago, which features people looking to eat orphans and hippies completely out of touch with reality even as they rail against it, really comes alive with Josh and Melissa doing what they can to engineer a happy ending, an approach to escaping a place that is way more bleak than either of them bargained for.
Naturally, their best-laid plans for freedom don’t quite work out and the happy-ever-afters they think they are engineering are simply a temporary reprieve from the futile existential hell of being alive for many of the characters in the show, quite a number of whom are played by actors from the first season.
Hence, Kristin Chenoweth, once a scheming preacher’s wife and conniving moral arbiter is now a wicked Annie-esque orphanage administrator while Alan Cumming goes from being the closeted mayor of Schmigadoon to being a Sweeney Todd-like butcher nursing searing grief and swirling vicious thoughts of bloody revenge.
And so it goes, with Ann Harada going from sweet doting wife to hardened club and brothel runner, Ariana Debose now a saucy MC a la Cabaret, Dove Cameron from perky waitress to garrulous but hurting club performer Jenny Banks who has some interesting relationships with other key people in the second season.
The standout, it won’t surprise you to learn, is Jane Krakowski who absolutely excels as highly unconventional lawyer Bobby Flanagan (a riff on Chicago‘s Bobby Flynn) and who delivers some brilliantly good, standout musical numbers that will make you feel like even jails and courthouses can be magical sexy and alluring.
While overall look and feel is WAY darker, and the songs and sets reflect that, Schmicago is a real pleasure to watch, avoiding the sophomore curse and the loss of the novelty that so buoyed season one, and giving us back key characters who, though they have completely different charts to course – part of the fun is watching Josh and Melissa not give away that they know these people because, of course, they no longer do even if they feel that sense of connection still – are as entertaining, fun and humanistic as ever, proving that though the type of musicals have changed, the basic challenges of being human, and in doing so in song too, have not and there’s still lots to relate it in these new, bleaker iteration of one of the most thoughtful and imaginatively realised shows to come along in years.
Schmigadoon! season 2 is streaming on AppleTV+ with more episodes to come …
You want an interview? We have an interview!
The Big Door Prize (S1, 5-7)
Are we fated to live out a certain destiny or do we make craft our own existential success or otherwise?
It’s one of the great philosophical and religious debates of the ages, and in the town of Deerfield, the cards spat out by the MORPHO machine in the general store continue to wreak havoc in episodes five through seven, focusing on the characters of “Trina”, “Beau” and “Giorgio” but largely at the hands of the recipients themselves and not because small thick pieces of blue care have suddenly developed the power of persuasive sentience.
That’s not to say they don’t have an undue influence on events because they do, with many people, highlighted at the gala dinner that Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) holds at lovelorn Giorgio’s – awkward, he’s lovelorn for Cass who’s married to Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) who is both a MORPHO sceptic and a bit of anxiety-ridden idiot of a husband, at the moment, anyway – pushing their lives in certain directions because a machine algorithm tells me them to.
But they aren’t really the problem; these people have by and large gone from not fulfilling their potential to sewing haute couture gowns or doing glittering table settings, none of which are really imperilling lives; in their cases, the cards have simply pushed to do something clearly in them already but hitherto unheeded.
No, the real problem for the good, and clearly, easily persuaded people of Deerfield – and to be fair, who of us would heed the card, driven as we all are, to extents greater or lesser, for some sort of definitive outside assessment of where our lives should head – is that long-simmering flaws, quirks and relationship weaknesses are coming to the fore or cracking open.
You could argue they might’ve done their thing anyway, and likely they would have, but equally people have a way of subsuming pain or dissatisfaction in all kinds of ways and that can continue for the duration of someone’s natural life … unless, of course, circumstances intervene.
Like small cards spitting out from a machine that is still of uncertain and somewhat creepy provenance.
Hence, Trina (Djouliet Amara) finally admits to the grief-twisted dead boyfriend’s father Beau (Aaron Roman Weiner) that she cheated on her deceased love – no one says it was with his twin, and Trina’s current secret boyfriend Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) until they do, and well, strangely vulnerable and tear-filled things ensue.
The greatest cracking of small town BAU centres on Dusty and Cass who clearly love each other but who are finding the questions raised by the cards to be shining an uncomfortably confronting spotlight on the state of their relationship.
It’s not broken, just tired but what’s interesting is that neither of them quite knows what to do with it; Cass is subsuming her marital woes, such as they are, and her continuing poor relationship with her mother, and the town’s mayor, Izzy (Crystal R. Fox) into craft and fundraising while Dusty is feeling a tad too sorry for himself, leading to more than a few poor choices.
It’s a fascinating excursion into the highs and lows of the human condition, punctuated by small flashes of wit, great existential angst and real vulnerability – the small but pivotal exchange between the local counsellor priest Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) and bartender Hana (Ally Maki) is touching and revelatory, illuminating what pain, disconnection and the need to belong look like when repressed but seeking some sort of necessary out – and it makes The Big Poor Prize, while not the best streaming show of the moment still a fascinating and moving exploration of what happens when possible fate and self-determination combine and we have to work out which one to heed …
The Big Door Prize is streaming on AppleTV+ with more episodes to come …