Courtesy of Connecticut College
Over the summer, I opened Instagram to find a picture of Sam Biondolillo– the man who was about to teach me introductory tech theater– grinning on the stage of Radio City Music hall, taking a selfie that showed rows and rows of A-listers in the audience. As the caption would inform me, my soon-to-be professor had just won a Tony for his work producing the Broadway musical “Schmigadoon!”. Thus, I decided to interview my professor about his involvement in the show, his process choosing shows to produce, and his experience at the most recent Tony Awards.
Professor Biondolillo, or Sam, as he prefers to be called, worked on “Schmigadoon!” as a co-producer with his company SAMS Entertainment. In his words, “There’s lead producers that manage the show, and then they bring in co-producers underneath them to help with various things like show outreach, fundraising, those types of things. And so, my company [was] brought in by Christine Schwarzman, who was one of the lead producers, along with Lorne Michaels. And primarily, we are responsible for making sure that the show is viable from a financial perspective. So we’re raising money for the show, we’re in and out of the theater during the tech process and rehearsal process.” SAMS Entertainment was brought in at the end of 2025 and supported the production on the four to five month lead up to the production’s Broadway opening. When I asked why Sam decided to join the production so close to opening, he explained that it was a number of positive factors. “When you’re co-producing, you’re really putting a lot of faith in the people who are managing the show, who the lead producers are, and so we’ve had a lot of experiences with [Christine Schwarzman’s company] No Guarantees. They have co-produced on our shows. We’ve co-produced on their shows. So we trust them a lot.” A catchy score doesn’t hurt, either. “We really liked the show. It’s really well done. It’s really well put together, particularly for something that is drawing reference from so many different things. Like it’s very easy for that to become very stock in a way, and I think Schmigadoon’s very clever in terms of how it is a love letter to the sort of golden age of musicals, without being heavy-handed about it or being sort of basic about it.”
However, Sam’s repertoire isn’t just upbeat homages to golden-age musicals. When I suggested that part of the appeal of “Schmigadoon!” was its escapism from a dreary reality, he agreed whole-heartedly. “I think it’s hard not to be like “the world is falling apart,” but there’s a lot of challenges right now that we’re dealing with, and I’m a big fan of shows that address those things head on. I mean, Sam [Houlihan] and I were lead producers on a show called “Data” that was all about AI basically taking over the world at the start of the year, and it’s gotten more relevant in the last six months than I would have liked. So we certainly are willing to sort of take those shows that really challenge those issues, but sometimes you just need a break from that. And so our feeling was that you really needed a show that people could just come and sort of release themselves for a couple of hours and just let go of what’s going on in the world. And so I just think that right now is a time where we feel like we could use a little bit of joy in our lives.”
This didn’t make “Schmigadoon!” a typical contender for Best Musical, though. Recounting the lead up to the Tony campaign, Sam remembered being surprised by the show’s own positive buzz. “We didn’t know what was going to be out on the field when we knew we were doing Schmigadoon. We didn’t know which shows we were competing against, so in March we were starting to put on our show and going, ‘We knew it was going to be good, but the show’s, like, really good.’ Like, better even than we had thought. And on top of that, there’s not a lot of shows that are like this right now on Broadway. We are kind of the unique value proposition in relation to the other shows. I mean, there’s a couple shows that were going to be big shows that, for whatever reason, didn’t quite hit. All those shows came and went, and so that’s when they started to kick up the Tony campaign a little bit into proper gear. …And we just kept winning all the other awards. We won Drama Desk, we won Outer Critic’s Circle, and so I think that’s when we sort of went ‘We might… we might win?’ We went from this like ‘We just want to have a show that’s the show on Broadway that’s bringing people joy, and we’re not going for awards, we don’t really care.’ I have found nine times out of 10, those are the shows that usually end up winning, because all you’re focused on is just making the show the best possible thing that it can be.”
