“Schmigadoon!,” the musical parody series canceled by Apple TV Plus after two seasons, will find a second life as a stage show making its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington next year.
“‘Schmigadoon!’ is by far the highlight of my career,” Paul said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s really just been delightful from start to finish, and that’s why I’m looking forward to expanding our audience in any way we possibly can.”
The series aired from 2021 to 2023 and starred Keegan-Michael Key and Cecily Strong as a bickering couple who stumble upon a fantastical town where the denizens express themselves via show tunes. The self-aware show’s first season, which riffed on such canonical musicals as “Brigadoon,” “South Pacific” and “The Music Man,” premiered to critical acclaim and earned Paul an Emmy for original music and lyrics.
After the second season shifted to a seedier 1970s aesthetic, referencing the likes of “Chicago,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Cabaret,” the third season — for which Paul finished 25 songs before Apple pulled the plug — would have moved to the 1980s and ’90s, he said. But the Kennedy Center production will be an adaptation of that Golden Age-influenced first season, with a streamlined script and some new songs.
The series’s ensemble featured a slew of decorated stage veterans, including Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Aaron Tveit, Dove Cameron, Jane Krakowski and Ariana DeBose, and Paul hinted that at least some cast members will reprise their roles at the Kennedy Center.
“Ideally, we’d bring everybody from the show to the stage,” Paul said. “But unfortunately, these people are very busy, so we’re going to do what we can.”
Paul is also working on finding a home for the series’s third season, on-screen or onstage, and getting “A.D. 16,” the biblical musical he co-wrote that premiered in 2022 at Olney Theatre Center, to Broadway. And if the “Schmigadoon!” world premiere finds an audience, he’d aim to land that show on the Great White Way as well.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had those aspirations,” Paul said, “deep down in my heart.”
“Schmigadoon!” will be the first new musical produced for the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage series, which typically revives classic musicals for limited runs with accelerated rehearsals. In recent years, the series has yielded a Neil Patrick Harris-directed staging of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” an acclaimed run of “Guys and Dolls” and a “Spamalot” production that earned a Broadway transfer.
The 2024-2025 Broadway Center Stage lineup will also feature productions of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” in October and “Legally Blonde the Musical” in June 2025. The Kennedy Center’s full theater season will include the Manhattan Theatre Club’s staging of the vaccine comedy “Eureka Day,” which will transfer to the Eisenhower Theater in March following a fall run on Broadway, and stops by the touring productions of “& Juliet,” “Life of Pi” and “Parade.”
