Schmigadoon: Dove Cameron and Aaron Tveit Sing a Different Tune in Schmicago

Are you ready to meet the dastardly denizens of Schmicago?

Schmigadoon! Season 2 takes us to a dark, seedy city inspired by the musicals of the 1960s and 70s.

Dove Cameron is already an icon in her own right, famous for her role in Disney's Descendents, Liv and Maddie, and a thriving pop music career.

In Schmigadoon! Season 1, she played the simple farmer's daughter Betsy. For Season 2, she is Jenny Banks, a role chiefly inspired by Kander and Ebb's anti-heroine Sally Bowles (made famous by Liza Minnelli in 1972's Cabaret).

Aaron Tveit is the Tony-winning star of Broadway's Moulin Rouge! and the big-screen movie adaptation of the mega-musical Les Misérables.

After playing Danny Bailey in Season 1, he's back as a rockin' leading man who is equal parts Jesus, Pippin, and Berger from Hair.

We caught up with Cameron and Tveit at a recent press junket to talk about their experiences filming Season 2 of the hit AppleTV+ musical comedy.

When you're playing these roles that are obviously parodies, does that make a difference in how you approach playing them, compared to when you're creating a character from scratch or playing it straight?

Dove Cameron: When you're doing something that is a loving parody, there is a sense of being on purpose about it.

The idea of taking a character that is so beloved, that is so in the zeitgeist, that you know it as well as the audience knows it -- the trick is to take all of the things you find so endearing about the character -- you're not poking fun.

There's no negative portrayal of the character as much as it is, like, your favorite silly things about your best friend -- That's the thing you want to bring out of the character. [They're] still beloved and recognizable, but [you're] in no way casting them in a negative light. It's done with great intention and almost worship.

Aaron Tveit: It makes it a little easier because you have a starting point as opposed to getting something that's a total blank slate, where you go off what's on the page and what you're inspired by from reading it.

With this, you have source material and other music to go and listen to, to draw from, and I imagine Dove's the same way, but for me, music is so informative.

Cameron: Oh, the most!

Tveit: So if [you] listen to songs from the shows we're pulling from, it makes you think and feel all these different things. You get to start from that place as opposed to starting from zero.

Did you rewatch Cabaret and Godspell and all those old musicals to get them in you before you showed up for Schmicago?

Cameron: Aaron and I were both familiar with all of these musicals and the elements we'd be touching on.

But I watched Cabaret, the film version, again. I hadn't seen it for a couple of years, and obviously, you watch it very differently when you're just an audience member versus when you're [preparing] to do something similar.

I wanted to get [Liza Minnelli's] lilt down, her speech pattern, some of her mannerisms, the eyes wider than her whole face, things were iconically her, (imitating) the cadence of her voice when she gets excited!

I just wanted to get the more visceral things that felt like a recognizable Sally Bowles and then have it take on a different life that wasn't attempting to actually recreate the character.

Tveit: Similarly, I listened to Pippin, Godspell, and Hair.

I rewatched the Jesus Christ Superstar movie, which I hadn't seen in many years, because I was very interested in the physicality of Jesus and Judas when they were singing, specifically, what they were doing in that film.

I wanted to have that familiar in my head when I went to shoot those scenes.

Cameron: Iconic film.

Tveit: Very. It's [hard to] believe that movie was made in the 70s! It was so progressive.

Your characters are so wildly different here compared to Season 1. How did you feel about the contrast between Season 1 and Season 2?

Cameron: I was excited to be more of a fully-fledged human this time!

The fun of what I experienced with Betsy in Season 1 was just that she was such a black hole of a person -- like there's not an ounce of humanity in Betsy. She's a caricature, and that was actually the point. I found meaning in the lack of meaning in her character.

It was very indicative of how women were viewed in that time, what the ideal ingenue was portraying, what she was saying to you, how little personality she had, so that you could project yourself onto her.

And while I actually found a lot of enjoyment in that, it's always more fun to play a real human being (laughs). It's always more fun to have an emotional arc that is at least a little bit more believable.

But Jenny is obviously a larger-than-life character, inspired by a couple of different iconic women, but also she's a young, traumatized girl, and that's something very human that I could relate to.

Tveit: Our characters in Season 1, as fun as they were to play, were a bit one-dimensional.

People would talk to my character, Danny, in Season 1, and he almost didn't even hear them, like that scene when Melissa (Cecily Strong) came in and said, "We're not gonna be together," and she left me in the shack, and I just continued to sing.

Cameron (laughing): That has me on the floor every time.

Tveit: It's like nothing changed [for them]. But whereas this season, we are actually affected by the people around us. We get to serve the central storyline, but we also get to change and grow within the story as well. The characters are more fleshed-out.

What number or scene was the most fun to film?

Cameron: I was really excited to shoot my Cabaret-style number, just because it was something I was actually quite nervous [about doing]. I always get excited doing something I'm unsure I'll be able to do. That was really fun.

I also had such a wonderful time as an actor performing my duet with Aaron, because we never really get to be grounded in this show [before then]. We had a really nice human moment where we just had the song and the chemistry and just let it be. That was lovely.

Tveit: Yeah, it was really nice to go to that very simple place after doing all the big showy things. Our duet was a wonderful moment in the season for me.

Also, getting to do the "Doorway to Where" was a lot of fun because I found that the more ridiculous I was, the more successful it was. I just found myself trying to make Keegan[-Michael Key] laugh. It was a lot of fun to go about that.

Did you make him laugh?

Tveit: I did! Making him or Cecily laugh felt like the greatest accomplishment of your life as an actor because they're incredibly funny.

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Schmigadoon! Season 2 premieres with two episodes on Wednesday, April 5, on Apple TV+.

This interview has been edited for length/clarity.