Theatre in Review: Schmigadoon! (Nederlander Theatre)Schmigadoon! is about a pair of troubled lovers who find themselves trapped in a musical, and whether you feel captive at the Nederlander Theatre these nights may depend on your affection for the Apple TV+ series from which Cinco Paul's entertainment is derived. To be sure, the rumpus at the Nederlander is an improvement. On television, the cast winked so strenuously that one feared somebody might burst a blood vessel; on stage, librettist-composer Paul's affectionate spoof of Broadway Golden Age musicals has room to breathe; blessedly, no one tries to oversell the joke. The Schmigadoon into which the disaffected Josh and Melissa wander is a mashup of Brigadoon, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The Music Man, spiced with touches of Finian's Rainbow. Paul has fun, at least initially, as Josh and Melissa try to make sense of the cavorting citizens of a charming, turn-of-the-century toytown -- she tentatively compares it to Colonial Williamsburg -- while racing to avoid the stampeding chorus. "It's like if The Walking Dead was also Glee," Josh grumbles. Indeed, as one of the early numbers puts it, Schmigadoon! is intentionally a heaping helping of "corn puddin'," served with a deceptively sincere grin. Most of the show's good times come from mingling with the locals, beginning with Max Clayton, who, as a Billy Bigelow type, stops the show cold with "You Can't Tame Me," a warning/invitation to Melissa, bewildered that a sexy, muscular carny is coming on to her. Clayton, who has star power to spare, belts and dances with such ease that he immediately announces himself as leading man material. Also contributing to the giddy atmosphere are McKenzie Kurtz as the town's Ado Annie figure, an irrepressible nymphet, with a giggle like a racehorse; Isabelle McCalla as a schoolmarm whose superannuated pupils major in tap dance; and Ana Gasteyer as the town scold, leader of Mothers Against the Future. ("So you're against...time?" wonders Josh). Set against these sly bits, however, is an overdrawn subplot about Mayor Menlove (Brad Oscar), the town's closet case; Ann Harada as his doomed-to-be-frustrated wife, and Malik Pancholy as the minister who might be the man of Menlove's dreams. In a Broadway scene currently oversaturated with coming-out jokes, the audience is so far ahead of the curve that the laughs never arrive. Worse, Josh and Melissa's constant petty squabbling (marked by tedious, trivial grievances) makes them a constant pain; one keeps wishing the dancers would push them into the orchestra pit and get on with the show. This is nothing against Alex Brightman, who, handed a half-decent laugh line, knocks it to the back of the balcony, nor Sara Chase, especially when making an embarrassed entrance in a vintage nurse's uniform that recalls Rosalind Russell as Sister Kenny. But even as they ignite the plot, Josh and Melissa often block the fun. Chase is additionally lumbered with a secondary romance, featuring Ivan Hernandez as a blockhead of a doctor, which, following the introduction of his Nazi-adjacent girlfriend, takes a wild left turn into Sound of Music territory. Even in these fanciful settings, it's one gag too many. The show has a good time with, among other things, a girl-and-picnic-basket raffle like the one in Oklahoma!, which comes with alarming undertones of sexual trafficking, and the number "Baby Talk," which cleverly reframes "Do Re Mi" as a sex education PSA ("Genitals are how we reproduce/Ovaries make eggs for you and me"). Director/choreographer Christopher Gattelli wrangles this semi-spoof with considerable skill, succeeding especially with the dance numbers, which draw on an Agnes-DeMille-meets-Onna-White vocabulary, even including a brief stab at a dream ballet. At such moments, Schmigadoon! offers plenty of the straight-up joy that was once the specialty of vintage musicals. Even so, it coasts on borrowed energy, with melodies culled from the DNA of half a dozen cast albums and too many bits that all come down to the same faux-innocent joke. The show wants to do for Rodgers and Hammerstein what Rick Besoyan's Little Mary Sunshine once did for the charmingly idiotic conventions of operetta. But Little Mary Sunshine, a blockbuster in 1961, opened in an environment in which revivals were notably rare. Our current theatre is top-heavy with old shows, exacerbated by programs like Encores. Even musicals with new scores seemingly derive inspiration from discarded pop styles or well-worn show-business conventions. Like Josh and Melissa, we're surrounded by the past everywhere we look, and we hardly need a Schmigadoon! to point this out. Also, the plot is so thin that each new situation and number feels like another box being ticked off Paul's lengthy list of must-have items. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, the endless quoting from other sources becomes self-defeating; this is an evening of footnotes in search of a primary source. The production design is packed with wit, especially Scott Pask's cutout town square, complete with the sign for a "multi-faith bake sale," offering tables for Methodists and Presbyterians. Pask approaches his task with a lightness of spirit and wickedly subdued sense of humor; the same is true of Donald Holder's lighting, which uses an array of sweeps and bumps to underline the fantastical nature of light in this land of musical comedy. Down to the last petticoat, Linda Cho's costumes breathe with the strenuous dances and look amusingly awkward on Brightman and Chase, whose preferred wear involves surgical scrubs. (Tom Watson's wig and hair designs provide solid support for Cho's designs.) Walter Trarbach's sound design is a model of clarity, even in the ensemble numbers, which allow one to enjoy Paul's often impish rhymes. To be sure, Paul is a major talent, of a sort we haven't seen in several seasons, and often his affection for the past is infectious. But now that he has gotten the cheerful inanities of Schmigadoon! out of his system, and having penned his love letter to the past, I'm eager to hear what his own voice sounds like. Unlike Gasteyer's character, we're not against the future. Don't be a stranger, Cinco. --David Barbour 
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