Yeah, I'd wondered about this:
https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-schmigadoon-onstage-at-the-kennedy-center.html
"Yet, for all its savvy reinvention of show tunes, the production’s handling of race strikes a discordant note. The TV series knowingly engaged with the way musicals of the ’40s and ’50s marginalized or caricatured characters of color without giving in to what the historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” And although it’s still engaged with the subject — the songs “Somewhere Love Is Waiting for You,” “He’s a Queer One, That Man of Mine,” and “I Thought I Was the Only One” sidle up to rather than soft-shoe away from prickly topics — the subtle self-awareness has been diminished for the stage. To state the obvious: Casting a white actor as Josh diminishes the opportunities for the show to probe these problems. Lines from the TV series about “color-blind casting” and “miscegenation” have vanished, as has Mildred Layton’s testy observation that Josh and Melissa make an “exotic couple.” Gone, too, is a scene in which Josh trades confidences with Emma Tate, the Black schoolmarm, about the “menace” Mrs. Layton. When Keegan-Michael Key’s character says to Emma, “So she’s got a problem with you, too … Yeah, that lines up,” there’s a flash in her anthracite eyes, as if he’s picked at a scab she never knew she had; no such tête-à-tête transpires in the Kennedy Center version (which, unlike the show, keeps the schoolroom set sparse, with no Abraham Lincoln portrait). On TV, when Josh presents Carson (Ayaan Diop), the lisping toddler town crier and Emma’s ward, with a kazoo he tells the boy: “When I was in school to be a doctor … there wasn’t anybody like me in my whole group. And to tell the truth, it got pretty lonely sometimes.” In the musical, the sentiment is genericized into: “The other kids made fun of me when I was your age too.”"
