Schmigadoon! returns with a six-episode sophomore season that features all new original songs and guest stars. Before the premiere on Wednesday, April 5, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cecily Strong, Keegan-Michael Key, Dove Cameron, and Aaron Tveit.
Having found true love in the town of Schmigadoon, season two of “Schmigadoon!” will find Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) in Schmicago, the reimagined world of ’60s and ’70s musicals.
“I think the most rewarding thing is working with the cast. It’s the other people in the cast,” Key told me when I asked about the experience. “Also, the crew, we had a fantastic crew because it’s everybody. It’s the art direction, the production design, the choreographer, the dancers, and the lighting — it’s everything. It’s the people that you get to spend your time with, especially when you’re working on something like this. You’re spending eight to twelve hours a day with the same people, it’s really great when you get to enjoy them, and they’re fantastic and they feed you.”
Strong continued by saying, “Everybody’s happy to be there and just loves what we’re doing. It’s sort of like, ‘Ready to see my thing?’ If you were a theater major in college, it’s like your showcase, you know? Like, ‘I get to do my big number for you now!’”
“I think that our characters got to go on a real journey on their own this season, whereas season one, we were much more functions for Cecily and Keegan to kind of bounce off of,” Tveit explained about their new roles. “We still do that this time, but I think that we each — and especially our kind of journey together, I think we each find ourselves through the other person. And so, it’s like we got to go on our own little story as well as serving the whole story this time around.”
“I was really happy to have a character that had more humanity than season one,” Cameron shared. “There was something I found really cathartic about it because she was such a paint-by-numbers, ingenue, oversexed character that was just very fun to acknowledge and play to a T because then you’re kind of like, ‘see how stupid that is,’ you know? But I think that the experience of playing Jenny, who is a more fully formed person with trauma, is also rewarding, I always feel like I learn more about myself at the end of a character arc, even with something like this, that is so over the top, and it’s still very human.”
We discussed which musical era they would like to travel to, the most rewarding part of working on the series, their characters’ season two arcs, and more!
Watch my interviews here:
