In “Schmigadoon!,” a musical comedy about musical theater starting a six-episode run Friday on Apple TV+, Cecily Strong and Keegan Michael-Key play Melissa and Josh, whose sputtering relationship has brought them out to the woods, backpacking on a “sacred love trail” where they are supposed to find one another again.
A bridge appears in the mist, and when they cross it, like Dorothy over the rainbow, they emerge from gray reality into a brightly colored, manufactured, soundstage world.
In terms of production, this is no amateur hour.
Barry Sonnenfeld , who worked with Sonnenfeld on “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and elsewhere, is the production designer.
“That’s why they usually let the songs do the heavy lifting.” As satire, some of it just feels off base: The inequality of women in old musicals is a recurring theme, but it’s not the case even of the shows the series takes off on.
If the town of Schmigadoon is a cosmic contraption designed to bring the leads together, it drives them apart instead, and this is the business that will take up much of the series’ running time.
That the series has been built especially for theater nerds is evident from the title onward, which is funny only if you know there is a musical called “Brigadoon,” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe — as in Brigadoon, Schmigadoon — and meaningful only if you’re familiar with its central plot device, in which a centuries-old town magically appears in the Scottish highlands once a year.
Why is this happening, other than that the idea of a meta-musical caught the authors’ fancy? One might say that the town appears because it’s what the protagonists require — broadly what happens in “Brigadoon” — but beyond Melissa watching a bit of Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain” there is no textual reason why the universe should have guided them to this particular form of unreality.
There are moments of real emotion.
To admire the sets and the choreography and appreciate the fact that, in the midst of a pandemic, the kids of the chorus got work.