Dove Cameron knew from the jump that her first dance partner for “Schmigadoon!” Season 2 was going to be a bit wooden.
Their big moment comes at the end of the Apple TV+ musical comedy’s season premiere, when Cameron’s Jenny Banks, a livewire starlet with a jet-black flapper’s bob and a seductive stare, drags an unassuming wooden chair across the dimly lit stage of the Kratt Klubb.
Against a shimmering red backdrop, and flanked by her cabaret dancers, Jenny launches into a kiss-off song called “Kaput” that requires Cameron to balance on, straddle and eventually settle into a split on top of the chair.
“Let me tell you something about those chairs: they were not nailed down, and they weighed about four pounds each,” Cameron tells PvNew. “Those fucking chairs are as flimsy as a piece of sourdough, and I was having a panic attack! It’s really funny because dancing with them requires so much more core work and muscular tension than one would think. When you look at it, it looks easy. But when I have one shoe firmly in the middle of the chair and the other is tracing around it, I am an inch away from death! It was so intense.”
In the song, Jenny may be saying goodbye to her many lovers around the world, but Cameron is also bidding adieu to the wholesome, candy-colored world of “Schmigadoon!” Season 1, in which she played Betsy, the dough-eyed farmer’s daughter.
When audiences last saw Melissa (Cecily Strong) and Josh (Keegan-Michael Key), the now-married doctors had reunited and left Schmigadoon, where people sing songs about falling in love and corn puddin’. But in Season 2, their struggle to start a family finds them missing the simple life. When they go looking for it, they land in Schmicago, a seedy city where people sing songs to seduce and deceive.
Where the first season took its musical cues from classic shows like “Brigadoon” and “Oklahoma!,” the songs wafting from the clubs, bars and alleys in Schmicago are far more reminiscent of an era of darker musicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Bob Fosse’s “Chicago,” “Cabaret” and “All That Jazz.”
Its inspiration may be darker, but “Schmigadoon!” remains a tongue-in-cheek affair, sending up the seriousness and grimness of those musicals whenever it launches into song.
“Kaput,” itself, is an impeccably written and choreographed homage to Liza Minnelli’s seminal “Mein Herr” performance from Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation of “Cabaret.”
In this rough-and-tumble new world, the first friendly face Melissa and Josh meet is Jenny, their new neighbor at Hotel Schmicago, who invites them to the Kratt Klubb for her big new number.
After her role as Betsy, which was more archetype than fleshed-out character, Cameron was thrilled about the darker, sexier turn as Jenny, who is equal parts Sally Bowles (Minnelli’s “Cabaret” character) and Velma Kelly, one of the merry murderesses of “Chicago.” But she knew Jenny shouldn’t just be an impression of two musical theater staples.
“I knew if I tasked myself with attempting to even get close to the portrayal that Liza gave us, I was going to be keeping myself up at night crying into my pillow,” she says with a laugh.
Instead, she used the lessons Minnelli taught her to turn the physically challenging “Kaput” into a sensual yet show-stopping number that would leave Jenny’s audience coming back for more. “When I watched Liza growing up, I thought she had this silent communication with the audience in her eyes,” Cameron says. “So I wanted to make sure anything I was doing with my face in that number felt like an intimate conversation with someone who was two inches away. Jenny Banks is having a subtle conversation with the crowd, and she is in control. Her movements are very calculated like she does this a hundred times a week, and she’s at home on the stage.”
The real hurdle was facing her nerves about the dancing. Cameron is a seasoned vocalist, but she’s also a self-proclaimed “non-dancer.” On paper, the number seemed destined to test her in that arena.
“It was a little bit daunting leading up to a solo dance number that was something I felt vocally comfortable with, but one that was just me and my fishnets on a chair,” she says. “But Chris Gattelli, our choreographer, is an angel of a human, and a genius at that, and made me feel really comfortable. I was really excited by the time we got to it and honestly sad when it was over.”
All that preparation, and yet she still had to work with a chair that wasn’t exactly pulling its weight. Luckily, Cameron had plenty of time to get acquainted with the inanimate object she had for a dance partner.
“Kaput” may be Jenny’s first big number, but it was the last one Cameron filmed for the season. Oscar winner Ariana DeBose, who plays the Kratt Klubb MC that introduces Jenny’s number, was on set only for a short time at the end of production, Cameron says. During that window, she also shot Episode 2’s closing number “Bustin’ Out” with DeBose and Strong, neither of whom she’d shared much screen time with in Season 1.
But like “Kaput,” it wasn’t a straightforward number either. The members of the trio are dressed as stylish escaped prisoners for the performance, who shuffle through a dance number with ankle shackles chaining them together.
“Those chains around our feet were deceptively difficult too,” Cameron says. “We looked at each other like every five minutes, and pinky promised we weren’t going to break each other’s necks. But I love those women more than anything, and I trust them more than anything, and we had a great time.”
She might have been more forgiving of the shackles because she had good company to share in the discomfort. But her feelings about the chair remain a different story.
“Anyone who dances with chairs will tell you, it’s like dancing with a very unreliable dance partner,” she says, laughing. “You have to sort of learn how to balance your weight in a way that you don’t fall and you have to trust your cabaret girls. The things that look so effortless are the things that take the most effort. That’s what I learned from this. This is stunt work, honey!”
