Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s postwar musical might seem like an incredulous romance but it holds great potential for updating in its central concept. An off-grid Scottish town called Brigadoon is untouched by time and magically returns for one day every hundred years. No one can leave or else the town disappears forever. When two Americans, Jeff (Cavan Clarke) and Tommy (Louis Gaunt), unknowingly stumble across it and the latter falls in love with Fiona (Danielle Fiamanya on press night), it is all set for a love story with a Shyamalan-like twist (The Village with bagpipes?).
Rona Munro’s adaptation does not make enough of this potential, although there is initial promise. The American interlopers are not the hunters of the original story but second world war pilots who have crashed in the Highlands. Tommy is injured, Jeff mentally scarred by war – or so it is intimated. But this goes nowhere beyond a few passing comments (“Wars happen and people get lost inside them,” says Fiona).
Instead this too tame, too purposeless revival seems simply to be a love letter to Scotland with bagpipes and drumming galore. Granted, that is part of atmosphere-building but there is little of substance beneath it.
So it swims in its own aspic rather like Brigadoon itself. Directed by Drew McOnie, the story seems missing for so long, with song after soupy song. Characters are either barely or bluntly defined, from Fiona to her sister Jean (Jasmine Jules Andrews), who is getting married, and the wench-like Meg (Nic Myers) who tries to woo Jeff. Tommy and Jeff are chirpy but characterless.
The cast is filled with strong singers, albeit approximate Scottish accents, but the songs sound anodyne and generic, from I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean to The Heather on the Hill. Performers run on and off stage, place heather on it and remove it again. McOnie’s choreography is beautiful and balletic in itself, like a love letter to the 1954 Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse film and so is Basia Bińkowska’s tiered wooden set. There is a twirling romance to Almost Like Being in Love and an expressive dance by Maggie (Chrissy Brooke) as she mourns the death of villager Harry (Danny Nattrass). But prolonged movement either swallows up the story or stands in for it.
There is the potential for complex characterisation in Harry, who fulminates on Jean’s wedding day before declaring he is leaving Brigadoon – thereby threatening its existence. This turns a seemingly happy community into an Ursula Le Guin-style dystopia where villagers must put collective happiness above individual fulfilment – rather like Le Guin’s characters in Omelas. The chase that follows, to stop him, should be chilling but you feel nothing of the tension, or greater moral issues, here.
So it is song and dance in search of a story. No miracles happen here, sadly.
At Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, until 20 September
