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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. It has been established that she is the one who thinks things need fixing, and he is the one who is fine with them as they are. You have met this couple, surely, or been part of it.
They get lost. It starts to rain. 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. The road they are on (brick, if not yellow) leads them to Schmigadoon, a turn-of-the-last-century hamlet, where they find themselves in the midst of an introductory production number, as when Harold Hill first ambled into River City, Iowa, in “The Music Man.”