‘Schmigadoon!’ Review: An Affectionate Golden Age Schpoof

Rejoice, ye musical nerds! On the stage of the Eisenhower Theater, off the Hall of States at the Kennedy Center, between the Watergate complex and the Lincoln Memorial, at the heart of America’s temple to high-minded midcentury cultural propriety, your disreputable art form, with its salty predilections and disruptive mores, is on loving display in “Schmigadoon!”

But maybe that’s overselling what is essentially a dandy little spoof of some tuners.

You may recall that “Schmigadoon!” was an Apple TV+ series about a contemporary couple who, experiencing relationship problems, find themselves trapped in a world of love-insisting musicals. During its first season, in 2021, that world was highly reminiscent of Broadway shows of the 1940s and ’50s like “The Music Man,” “Carousel” and “Oklahoma!” but with bits of “The Sound of Music,” “Brigadoon” and “Kiss Me, Kate” tossed in. In the second season, the scene shifted to “Schmicago” and musicals of the ’70s. (An unproduced third season would have taken the couple “Into the Schmoods.”)

The show being offered through Sunday by the Kennedy Center’s musical theater initiative, called Broadway Center Stage, is essentially the first season’s six-episode arc boiled down to two acts by its author, Cinco Paul. If you loved the television show, you probably know every note. If not, you probably don’t want to.

I say that as someone whose feelings run in the middle. Neither onscreen nor onstage was I ever very interested in the on-the-outs couple, Josh and Melissa, for the simple reason that as characters they are skeletally thin. He’s the repressed, flat-affect guy; she’s in touch with her ambivalence to the point of annoyance. Though very smartly and appealingly performed here, by Alex Brightman and especially Sara Chase, neither would have lasted two scenes as protagonists of any of the musicals “Schmigadoon” models itself on.

But, oh, those musicals! They are classics for a reason, whether for pure delight or complex feeling, and never as normative as they appear on the surface. “Oklahoma!” asks us to accept the inevitable harshness of life but not buckle under it; “Carousel” questions the possibility of redemption. “The Music Man” suggests that, in River City as elsewhere, even the truest love is a bit of a scam.