Ann Harada on Why Schmigadoon! Feels Like Home for Musical Theater Fans

Funny lady Ann Harada has been a Broadway staple since her breakout role in the original cast of Avenue Q. Portraying Christmas Eve, an irreverent therapist from Japan, Harada lent her well-oiled comedic chops and crystalline belt to the grown-up puppet show. Since then, she has been an office gossip in 9 to 5, a self-involved stepsister in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and a put-upon stage manager on NBC's musical drama series, Smash.

Elsewhere on the small screen, Harada was among the all-star cast of theater vets who brought Schmigadoon! to life on Apple TV+. Featuring the buoyant music of co-creator Cinco Paul, the comedy followed Josh and Melissa, a discontented couple who get trapped within a song-and-dance spectacular. While Melissa revels in the chance to live out her Broadway dreams, Josh must overcome his disdain for musical theater in order to escape. Harada is now reprising her role as Florence Menlove, the daffy and somewhat dim-witted wife of the town mayor, in the Tony-nominated Broadway adaptation of the show. Speaking with Broadway.com, Harada discusses the screen-to-stage evolution of Schmigadoon!, the show’s similarities to Avenue Q and having an All About Eve moment with Liza Minnelli.

You hold the distinction of having been in Schmigadoon! through all of its iterations. How has it been to see this work evolve in real-time?
Every show develops in a different way, but Schmigadoon! is incredibly unique in that it started as a TV project. I didn't really have any developmental input in that particular process. The material was written and we executed it to the best of our ability and it got filmed. But bringing it to the stage is a whole different thing for everybody involved, because our writer [Paul] had to decide what he wanted to keep, what he wanted to expand and what he wanted to cut from the TV show. So that part of the process has been very normal for me. When you’re working on a new show, you throw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and then you kind of see what sticks. For instance, [during a preview performance] Sara Chase [who plays Melissa] and I were doing a number that was half of an old song, half of a new song. At the end of it, we looked at each other and were like, "We have no idea what we just did."

In Schmigadoon! you play Florence, the loyal but long-suffering wife of Mayor Menlove. What's it like working with your onstage husband, Brad Oscar?
Brad is a doll and I've known him for many years socially, but we've never worked together before. So it's been a real treat for me. We're both such theater veterans that we really are the mayor and mayoress of Schmigadoon! because it's sort of like, look at these two old cowhands. We've been in it a long time. We're about the same age and we have a lot of the same friends. We just get each other's references and he's a real musical theater baby, too. So it's really been a pleasure.

This production celebrates Golden Age musicals. What is your own relationship to that genre?
When I was very young, my parents took me to see a touring company of The Sound of Music. I had that book, Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which I practically memorized. I just felt so drawn to the form and I always have been. For people my age, we grew up before there was a VHS tape or a DVD at your disposal, so we had to wait for things to be screened on television to watch them. I remember my parents sitting me down in front of the TV with a TV tray and being like, "The Wizard of Oz is on tonight; Cinderella is on tonight." So those sorts of things were really formative for me. When I did Cinderella, I got to originate a role on stage that had kind of been written for me. It was a new adaptation by Douglas Carter Beane, but it had all the songs from the Cinderella I grew up watching. It just seemed like, “Oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing,” because I understood the past and what we were trying to achieve in the present as well. I think it's all about trying to make the Golden Age accessible and meaningful to a modern audience.

The series has attracted a passionate fanbase. Why do you think Schmigadoon! resonates with audiences?
I think there may be more people in the world like you and me than we thought. It speaks to this thing in all of us that's like, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a world that we could go to where life was a musical every day?" There's an idea of a community of people that you belong to that is ruled by music and dance and beauty. That’s the way that it feels when you're in a musical, the way that it feels when you're in anything on the stage, right? You create your own family and it's where I want to live all the time, that sense of, "I belong someplace and everybody understands me." That’s what people were searching for, especially during the pandemic. I didn't anticipate the response because I do think that there are more Joshes than there are Melissas. There's a lot of Joshes in the world. My husband is a Josh. I was thrilled that there were so many Melissas and they all came out to see the show when it premiered in D.C.

Speaking of fans, Avenue Q has quite the cult following. Did you anticipate it would be so popular?
I think for all of us involved, we just thought, "This makes us laugh." That's kind of all you know when you're working on something. I remember thinking, "I don't know that my sense of humor is everybody's sense of humor, but this really makes me laugh." It was so delightful to find that a lot of people shared my sense of humor. I've always been dumbfounded by how it kind of took over the world; I sort of thought its home would be off-Broadway forever. When Avenue Q was moved to Broadway, I was like, "This will never work." I thought the Broadway venue would be too big for the puppets. I'm so grateful that I was wrong. The themes in that show are not so dissimilar [to Schmigadoon!]. Avenue Q is not a Golden Age musical, far from it, but its themes of community, of having to live with people who are not like ourselves and learning how to navigate the world, are all the same.

You have a knack for playing comic roles. Were you always funny?
As a young child I never entertained any ambitions of being a performer. But I did know I could make people laugh and I kind of used it as a secret weapon when I needed to. It was only once I went to high school and started doing theater that I was like, "Oh, I wonder if this is something I could do later." I was mostly cast in character parts, obviously. I was Lucy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I've always been a character actress.

You made your Broadway debut in M. Butterfly. Could you take us back to the beginning of your career and speak to that experience?
They were replacing the great Lori Tan Chinn and they needed an Asian character actress and there I was. I got the job because I had worked as an intern for a Broadway producer on a show called Sleight of Hand. The casting director was Meg Simon, who was the same casting director for M. Butterfly. She remembered me when they were casting this production because she'd come to see me do a cabaret at The Duplex. I just thought of it as kind of testament to the concept that you've got to keep putting yourself out there. I'm so grateful for the way that it all worked out. I had only done one Equity show before that. I didn't realize how fast the replacement process was. You have maybe two weeks and then you’re in the show. You might not really get to perform with the actual performers before you get on stage in the show. You rehearse with the understudies and the stage manager, but you don't really know anything. You're just sort of thrown in there and it is brutal. I didn’t fall down, so it was fine, I guess.

Now, for a non sequitur. You were Liza Minnelli’s stand-in for her concert Minnelli on Minnelli. Do you have any memories of working with her?
Are you kidding? I have the greatest memories. I was literally hired for like a week, right? But for that week, I watched her do that show every day in tech. I got to stand in for her so she could watch the lighting. I would basically stand all the places she stood, move through her numbers and I would hold her clothes in front of me, carrying this very heavy Bob Mackie jacket around. During the course of tech, they figured out that I was a performer, so they would be like, "Ann, why don't you just go through the number?" I'm literally sitting in a director's chair, in front of her band, singing her orchestration. It was Minnelli on Minnelli, so there's clips of her father's movies and, of course, Meet Me in St. Louis is one of them. In the show, she performed in front of a clip of Judy [Garland] singing “Trolley Song.” So at one point, I actually stood there and sang “Trolley Song” in front of Judy for Liza. I was doing my very best Liza/Judy impression for Liza Minnelli. I was like, "This is the greatest, gayest moment of my life and I'm happy, happy, happy." I just couldn't believe it. The great thing about this is that I'm sure she doesn’t remember and that's fine, because I had the time of my life.

Did you have any interactions with her during that magical week?
Oh yeah. I would be sitting up on the balcony watching and taking notes and stuff, and every once in a while she'd call up and say, "Eve, Eve, where are you?" And I'd yell, "I'm coming, Margo!" And I'd run down the stairs.

Closing the loop on Schmigadoon!, in what ways has this project impacted your life?
I look on it as one of my primary legacies. The thing about being a stage actor is so much of your work is completely ephemeral. There's so little record of a stage actor's work. It's just shared between you and whoever got to see your performance, which on a Broadway scale is certainly more than most stage actors get, but is still a very limited. Whereas once it's filmed, like on TV, I know my performance was seen by so many more people. In the future, people will go, "What was Ann Harada like?" And they'll be able to watch this. I felt very privileged to be part of it in the TV production because I was well aware that everybody else was a huge theater star and I was just like a normal person. I felt so proud to be included in that company and I still am. I feel the same way about this stage company. We're all completely devoted to [director-choreographer] Chris Gattelli and Cinco Paul. I would literally follow them off a cliff if that's what they wanted me to do, because I trust them and I believe in their vision. And I kind of feel like we all feel that way, we drink the Kool-Aid. But obviously I was the first Kool-Aid drinker and I will be the last Kool-Aid drinker. I am fully on the Schmigadoon! bandwagon and I will be forever. I'm very, very proud of being a part of this work.

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