Schmigadoon! Brings Its Inside Jokes to Its Ancestral Home
6 / 10
If you respond to musical theater like a professor with a grading rubric, I can’t imagine you’d find fault with Schmigadoon! The show’s got love songs, patter songs, a few reprises, a soliloquy, and production numbers with hooky choruses guaranteed to stick in your head. There’s a big ensemble, elaborate costumes, a book that winks at every Rodgers and Hammerstein inconsistency that has ever bothered you, and, briefly, a dream ballet. It’s exuberant, clever, eager to please, dexterously devised, and yet, with all that technique behind it, it lands in a place that’s awfully unambitious. Why does a love letter to the classic musical make the project of musical theater feel so damn small?
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