Brigadoon at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre review: it's a neglected classic for a reason

Though it’s charmingly and stylishly done here, Brigadoon is what’s known in the theatre world as a justly neglected classic. A mimsy, shortbread-tin fantasy of magical Scottish romance from 1947, it was Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s fourth collaboration, with few standout songs and a laughable plot.

Director and choreographer Drew McOnie’s revival – the first in London since 1988, and the finale to his first season running the Open Air Theatre – just about works thanks to some fine performances, spirited choreography and a strikingly effective Grand Designs set by Basia Bińkowska. But it’s an effort to tough your way through the more saccharine moments.

Award-winning playwright Rona Munro has tweaked Loewe’s silly script. With the violent Jacobite Rising of 1745 looming, a deal was struck (by a priest with god in the original, by an elder with “spirits” here) ensuring the plaid-weaving hamlet of Brigadoon could disappear into the Scottish mist, rematerializing for 24 hours every 100 years. While a century goes by in the wider world, a single day has passed in Brigadoon.

No one will harm the village because it won’t ever be around long enough to be noticed, the thinking goes. As a by-product (how?), it becomes a place of peace, wellbeing and fecundity, full of flirtily skirt-whipping wenches and strapping kilted lads. Oh, and the spell will collapse if anyone leaves (why?). But a stranger can stay if he falls in love (what?!?). Surprise, surprise, in 1945, two Americans stumble into this sexually charged idyll on the day of its re-emergence.

In the original Jeff and Tommy are game-hunting tourists but Munro turns them into downed WWII airmen. Brigadoon heals their war-weary heartsickness and the physical injuries of Louis Gaunt’s Tommy. This adds a smidgen of jeopardy to Tommy’s decision to stay or go after falling for feisty Fiona MacLaren (Danielle Fiamanya, who shares the role with Georgina Onuorah). It also makes for a neater ending.

(Mark Senior)

McOnie starts strong, calling the fantasy world into being with bagpipers and drummers trooping through this lush and leafy auditorium. The costumes are deconstructed versions of highland garb, echoing the pastel colours of heather, gorse and cowslip atop the wooden slopes of the set. The big dance routines are a graceful whirl of balletic movement, the set pieces (including a sword dance and a funeral lament) distinctive and finely honed.

But the strongest songs are the comic numbers The Love of My Life and My Mother’s Wedding Day, sung by Nic Myers’s pertly up-for-it Meg, who inexplicably has the hots for Cavan Clarke’s testy Jeff. I can’t be the first to note that the romantic Act One closer, it’s Almost Like Being in Love, sounds remarkably like People Will Say We’re In Love from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, first staged in 1944 and apparently an inspiration for Lerner and Loewe.

The characters are thin and the leads are thoroughly upstaged. The nimble, wedding-day chemistry between Gilli Jones’s charismatic, sweet-voiced Charlie and Jasmine Jules Andrews as Fiona’s earthily guffawing sister Jean is far more potent than that between Fiona and Tommy. The dances of jealousy and grief performed by Danny Nattrass’s Harry (who loves Jean) and Chrissy Brooke’s Maggie (who loves Harry) are far more expressive and involving than the central narrative dilemma.

And even if you completely disconnect your brain, niggling questions persist. How did Brigadoon’s villagers come to understand and accept the frankly bizarre terms of their pact with the supernatural in just 48 hours and two quantum leaps through time? How does trade with the outside world work? Will Brigadoon reappear in 2144 in the middle of a Trump golf course, a nuclear wasteland, or underwater?

McOnie’s production is a pleasant diversion that sits well in this arboreal venue, which delivered a bout of authentically Scottish drizzle on press night. But the plot, the characters and the score of Brigadoon melt away like Scotch mist. To co-opt Gertrude Stein’s line about her hometown of Oakland, the problem with Brigadoon is that “there’s no there there”.

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, to Sept 20; openairtheatre.com

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