From Screen to Stage: The Reinvention of Schmigadoon! for Broadway

Adapting a screen property for the stage is a lesson in the art of translation. Intimate moments designed for the camera must suddenly reach the last row of the balcony. Scenes that once cut back and forth from location to location must be reshaped to fit the practicalities of live theater. For the team behind Schmigadoon!, however, the biggest surprise might have been the discovery that something that already breathed like a stage show still had to be torn apart and rebuilt before it could truly exist as one.

When Schmigadoon!, one of the most anticipated new musicals of the season, opens at the Nederlander Theatre on April 20, it will have fulfilled a dream that writer Cinco Paul has been imagining for decades, and especially since the pandemic. That’s when he and a group of Broadway’s finest—including Kristin Chenoweth, Aaron Tveit, Alan Cumming, Jane Krakowski, and tons of others—bubbled themselves in Canada to create this quirky Apple TV series, about two New York doctors who wind up trapped in a technicolor town where life unfolds like a Golden Age musical.

A loving homage to Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon, and The Music Man, Schmigadoon! is the kind of show where a picnic basket, a tongue-twisting patter song, and a chorus line of gingham-clad dancers can solve all of life’s problems. It was a televised balm at a grim moment, and as things have gotten even less sunny in the real world, it’s providing similar comfort in person.

To audiences, anyway. As for Paul and the show’s director and choreographer Christopher Gattelli? They had work to do before they could sit back and enjoy the ride.

For Paul, who co-created the series with longtime writing partner Ken Daurio, and co-wrote four of the six episodes, and solo-penned the book, music, and lyrics for the stage production, the first act was to fundamentally rethink how the story functions in a different medium. While the show is an expanded adaptation of the first season, Paul’s first instinct was to put all six scripts back-to-back. “I made a massive file of those six episodes and said, ‘Now it’s a stage musical.’ Then I realized that does not work. There were a lot of adjustments and things I wanted to fix, that I didn’t think we got quite right with season one.”

Regardless, Gattelli knew that the bones were there. “In the way it’s crafted, it’s the perfect musical,” he says. “It just works as a stage production.” His desire to go back to basics with the stagecraft necessitated structural changes. Scott Pask’s set is a series of lush, painted backdrops and physical pieces that evoke the bygone era. “Scenically, we’re trying to keep it classic. We don’t have elevators [in the stage], so that had to change some locations.”

That paralleled the work Paul was doing to streamline his adaptation. “There was the discovery that we’ve got way too many locations and too much intercutting between scenes,” he explains. In trying to crack the code, he turned to the tried-and-true: Oscar Hammerstein II’s 83-year-old book for Oklahoma! “Act 1 [of Oklahoma!] takes place in one location. We needed to better emulate that.” The result was a full reset, where the team decided to “keep what’s working and be vicious about everything that’s not.”

That philosophy was already visible during the show’s 2025 world premiere at the Kennedy Center, where, as our critic observed, the material began to reveal how naturally it could live onstage, even as it was still in its first phase. The Broadway production, led by Sara Chase, Alex Brightman, Brad Oscar, Ann Harada, and Ana Gasteyer, has built upon that foundation, refining the storytelling further with new material for characters like Chase’s Melissa and Max Clayon’s Billy Barker-esque Danny Bailey, as well as clarifying the language of Gattelli’s movement.

Having created the spectacular dances for the television show, Gattelli found himself with some numbers that translated to the stage with surprising ease, and others that needed to be completely rethought. “The big first-act production number, ‘Corn Puddin’,’ was a good wide shot [on-screen], so most of it was able to be retained [in person],” he said. “Some things just work and feel good. It’s familiar to people and they want to see it.”

On the other hand, “Tribulation,” the “Ya Got Trouble”-style showstopper that Chenoweth originated and is now performed eight times a week by Gasteyer, required complete reinvention. “‘Tribulation’ was a five-minute one-take,” Gattelli says. “That’s a number with a lot of great moments internally that remain, but we can’t do it in the same way onstage. It had to be rebuilt.” But overall, neither he nor Paul are trying to fix what’s not broken, just spruce things up. “Although it sounds crazy,” Paul notes, “in a way, the TV show was our out-of-town tryout.”

Coming off Death Becomes Her, Gattelli is keenly aware of how different kinds of humor land in a theater. While the laughs in that show are “all biting,” Gattelli’s latest project is more down-to-earth. “Schmigadoon! is hilarious, but not in a mean way. It’s not spoofing anything; it’s a love letter to the classics.”

And just as Schmigadoon! was there to put a smile on our theater-geek faces during Covid, the Broadway version is here to do the same thing at an even darker time. “I know there is a need for laughter right now,” Gattelli says, “and I’m grateful that we get to make people laugh all night.”