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Washington Post

How ‘Schmigadoon!' went from TV show to stage musical

NEW YORK — Rhubarb squares, French éclairs and flambéed pears are among the delectable rhymes on the menu this mid-January morning at a Times Square rehearsal hall, where the team behind the 'Schmigadoon!' stage musical is cooking up a new song about sugary indulgences. As Kevin Del Aguila and Brad Oscar sing the tune, in which their closeted characters use baked goods as a metaphor for their romantic tastes, their alternating lyrics converge on a shared fondness for a particular filling. 'Especially if they're apricot,' the actors sing in harmony, widening their eyes and turning toward each other with epiphanic affection. 'I thought I was the only one.' All the while, Cinco Paul is beaming. As the co-creator of the Apple TV Plus series 'Schmigadoon!' and the writer behind this Kennedy Center-bound stage adaptation, Paul relishes hearing his songs leap from page to stage. When he's not gently flagging internal rhymes that slipped past the actors or relaying how he got the spoofing songs legally approved, the 60-year-old is explaining the tune's inspiration. 'I really do love rhubarb squares,' the ever-wholesome Paul says. 'You write what you know.' 'Aha!' Del Aguila exclaims. 'I knew this was autobiographical.' Well, not autobiographical — but undeniably personal. A lifelong lover of Broadway musicals, Paul co-wrote such animated blockbusters as 'Despicable Me,' 'Horton Hears a Who!' and 'The Secret Life of Pets' before circling back to his childhood passion in recent years. After serving as the showrunner on the 'Schmigadoon!' series, Paul penned the book, music and lyrics for the stage version beginning its world premiere at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater this week — a rare leap for a TV show and a splashy get for the venue. 'Cinco has one of the purest hearts, and obviously is so gifted to be able to create a world, imagine it, write the songs,' says Ann Harada, the only actor from the streaming series reprising her role onstage. 'He's the god of 'Schmigadoon!' To follow somebody who has a vision like that is such a pleasure.' Growing up in Arizona, Paul fell for musicals while devouring his mother's cast albums for 'Camelot,' 'South Pacific' and 'Guys and Dolls.' As a high school freshman, he was recruited to play the piano for a student production of 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying' and promptly found community among the theater kids. When he applied to the University of Southern California's film school three decades ago, he wrote that his show-business goal was to revive the movie musical. For years, that ambition went on the back burner. Once Paul and his creative partner, Ken Daurio, wrote the screenplay for 2010's 'Despicable Me' — the family-friendly juggernaut about a supervillain turned hero and his army of gibberish-spouting Minions — the duo were recruited to pen a pair of sequels, among other animated endeavors. But after 'Despicable Me 3' came out in 2017, Paul decided to step away from the franchise — which has now generated more than $5 billion at the global box office — and used his newfound cachet to get a passion project off the ground. 'If it wasn't for 'Despicable Me,'' Paul says, 'there would be no 'Schmigadoon!'' At that point, the concept had been sitting with Paul for a quarter-century. After watching the 1981 movie 'An American Werewolf in London,' which begins with two backpackers trudging through the English wilderness, Paul found himself tickled by the parallels between the film's premise and that of the 1954 musical 'Brigadoon,' in which a pair of hunters stumble upon a mystical Scottish village. Imagining a riff on those plots — what if a backpacking couple discovered a town where everyone communicates via show tunes? — Paul sat at his piano and composed a song titled 'Not That Kinda Gal.' 'Then I kind of just filed it away for literally 25 years,' Paul says, 'because I didn't know exactly what to do with it.' 'Schmigadoon!' aired its Golden Age-inspired first season in 2021, starring Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key as the central couple and an ensemble packed with Broadway stars: Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Aaron Tveit, Jane Krakowski, Ariana DeBose. After lampooning the likes of 'The Music Man,' 'Carousel' and 'Oklahoma!' in that initial installment, the show returned in 2023 for a second season that parodied the seedier musicals of the 1960s and '70s. Although Paul wrote 25 songs for a third season, which would have ventured into the '80s and '90s, Apple canceled the series. Paul, however, wasn't done with 'Schmigadoon!': During the Hollywood writers strike, he wrote a stage adaptation of the show's first season. Initially, Paul only imagined the musical being licensed for high school productions. But soon enough, he found there was an appetite for something glitzier. When Jeffrey Finn, the artistic director for the Kennedy Center's Broadway Center Stage series, was approached about producing the project, he needed 'less than a millisecond' to say yes. For a series that typically stages musical revivals for limited runs, the chance to mount a world premiere was a natural next step Finn had long been eyeing. 'This felt like the absolute right project to be able to do Broadway Center Stage's first world premiere,' Finn says. 'We knew the story that Cinco had so brilliantly created. It wasn't a world where we had to figure out, 'What does this new musical want to be?' We already knew where we were, so I felt that we were miles ahead in the development.' While Paul acknowledges that reassembling the streaming series's cast would have been a dream, he always knew that wasn't going to happen. 'The only way we ever got that cast initially was because it was during covid and people were available,' he says. 'Really, the best thing for the material to prove that it exists beyond the TV show, and beyond that cast, is to cast all new people.' Two-time Tony nominee Alex Brightman ('Beetlejuice') and Sara Chase ('The Great Gatsby') are now the bickering couple Josh and Melissa, alongside Broadway standouts Del Aguila, Oscar, Isabelle McCalla, Ryan Vasquez, McKenzie Kurtz, Javier Muñoz and Emily Skinner. And Harada reprises her role as Florence Menlove, the exasperated first lady of Schmigadoon. 'It's going to be very difficult for me not to cheese out onstage,' Brightman says. 'What thrills me is getting real high-class musical theater people who love musical theater doing the thing they love at the highest, most absurd form.' Paul added a slew of new songs and reprises. One tune — Oscar and Del Aguila's 'I Thought I Was the Only One' — was penned specifically for the stage show. Other numbers — including Kurtz's 'I'm Not That Kinda Gal,' the song that started it all — were restored after being cut from the series. To incorporate the new music and retain the existing songs, all while reducing the overall run time, Paul took a 'very aggressive' approach to cutting down the dialogue, streamlining scene transitions and reducing the number of sets. 'I won't say we didn't have work to do, but the structure was there. The story was there,' says Christopher Gattelli, the Tony winner who is directing the stage show after choreographing the streaming series. 'The first time we read through it, it just felt so good and like a complete piece.' Asked about his hopes for the show's future, Paul doesn't hedge. 'I want everybody in the world to see 'Schmigadoon!'' he says with a sheepish grin. Brightman, who starred in the 2023 production of 'Spamalot' that transferred from the Kennedy Center to Broadway, is more specific. 'This is a Broadway show,' Brightman says. 'I just don't know how you don't like this. If you like musicals, you will like this. There's no way you won't. And if you don't, you're wrong.' John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Eisenhower Theater, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. Dates: Jan. 31-Feb. 9. Prices: $99-$315.