“As you can probably tell, I freaking love musicals,” says Cinco Paul. You don’t even have to watch his new show to know that much is true. It is, after all, right there in the title: “Schmigadoon!”
Premiering July 16 on AppleTV+, the series is a first of its kind musical-comedy-satire which follows a couple (played by Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key) who head out on a retreat in the hopes of reigniting their spark, only to become trapped in a song-and-dance Golden Age musical world. Their only way out, of course, is through finding true love, and the plot naturally relies upon every tried and true musical theater trope–and then relies as much on turning each one just slightly askew.
How To Get Cast on Broadway “It is a weird show. I still think it’s crazy that we got to make it,” confesses Paul, the series’ co-creator (with frequent collaborator Ken Daurio), showrunner, executive producer, and writer of all its original songs. The idea had been gestating for about 25 years, though in an amorphous form. “As soon as we sold the pitch to Apple, immediately I was thinking, We need to address this particular musical; parody this musical. But fine tuning it, as far as, How will musical theater help these two people become better people? That really became the guide to what [theater conventions] we chose to use.”
The episodes also became defined by a series of central, archetypal relationships (between the bad boy, the stern father figure, the farmer’s daughter, and so on), which allowed for casting of true blue musical theater talents, the likes of which include Kristin Chenoweth, Ariana DeBose, Alan Cumming, Dove Cameron, Aaron Tveit, and others. They were mostly cast off of a literal vision board, thanks to the fact they’d been largely out of work due to the pandemic.
Why Dove Cameron Remembers Her Disney Channel Days as an ‘Intense Internship’ “I always felt strongly that I wanted to get live singing on set, and pretty much every number is them singing live. Because of that, I wanted actors with Broadway experience, who have done eight shows a week,” Paul says. “I didn’t want to dub anybody. I also was really strongly committed to long takes with not a lot of cuts, so we could actually see the choreography. So I really wanted people with those musical theater chops who could deliver. And we got them! We got them all because theaters were shut down.”
Though “Smigadoon!” does parody family friendly musicals of yore, it is very much for adults, which is in stark contrast to most of Paul’s work prior to this point. Best known for co-writing the “Despicable Me” films as well as “The Secret Life of Pets,” he relished the opportunity to create more sophisticated material for a more sophisticated audience. However, there’s no doubt that his work in animation armed him with the ability to tell stories with both precision and endurance.
“Writing animation is a marathon. It’s a process. It takes three years to make the movie, and you’re rewriting it almost every day. You’re turning in pages, so boy, it was definitely a bootcamp in learning to tell a story concisely, because those are short movies,” he says. “The biggest learning curve [when switching to television] was creating episodes and cliff hangers. It’s a different structure than film, obviously. We’ve made a zillion mistakes, but you get a chance to learn from them.”
By that same account, Paul’s advice to fellow and aspiring creatives is not to get bogged down by the idea of perfection. It doesn’t exist. Instead, commit to completing something, learn from it, and then move onto your next one, better than when you started. And then commit to completing that one, too.
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About His Process
“My recommendation is, always finish something. That’s the only real process in which you’ll become a better writer,” he insists. “It’s never about one script. That’s not going to be your ticket. Your ticket is yourself. The more scripts you write, that’s going to benefit you more than saying, ‘I’m gonna write the script that’s gonna change everything.’ You write the script that changes you, that makes you better, and people hopefully will recognize that and they’ll want to hire you to write stuff.
“I feel like my entire career has been leading to ‘Schmigadoon!’ ” he adds, “because it’s so much of me, and the stories I want to tell.”
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