Sarah on theater

Final performance of “Brigadoon,” a rare revival of a 1947 oldie. Gorgeous, gorgeous production in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. (My curtain call photo doesn’t capture how lovely it was with the vibrant dramatic lighting illuminating the slopes of the set—maybe the prettiest show I’ve seen!) I also loved Drew McOnie’s choreography, which had a real bombastic old-time Broadway energy in the group numbers but also afforded some time for smaller, intimate, expressive moments by individual dancers.

Some folks find old musicals to be impenetrable. They err on the side of formulaic, feel-good syrup. The Act 1/2 split tends to be something like 1h45m/45m and leaves people restless. Female characters often can’t pass the Bechdel test. Sometimes they give meandering songs to minor characters. I like seeing the Golden Age stuff, but it definitely takes some conscious effort for me to not get overzealous with a contemporary lens and discount the things they do well. New musicals aren’t unanimously better, but, for sure, we’ve learned some collective lessons over time.

It’s also okay to take the modern hatchet to oldfangled things—it’s a viable choice, anyways. There are no sacred cows, and a beautiful thing about theater is you can treat the material as living, breathing, modular pieces, reconfigurable to suit the times. Indeed, this production of “Brigadoon” does some of the work of adjusting to standards for you: Scottish playwright Rona Munro was brought on to update the book for a new audience. With the heavy caveat that I haven’t seen a production with the older book, I’m not convinced that this is a successful readaptation.

In Lerner & Loewe’s original work, two American hunters are lost in the Scottish Highlands and stumble upon a mysterious village named, yes, Brigadoon. They come to find out that this is quite a lucky day to be passing by; the village is under an enchantment that causes it to wake up for one day every 100 years, otherwise hiding its denizens away from a hostile world. One of the men, Tommy, falls fast for a village woman, Fiona, and the great tension is whether he will abandon his life and fiancée to follow her into this blissful state of suspension.

The most prominent change in Munro’s new book is that Tommy and his hunter buddy, Jeff, are recast as bomber pilots, crash-landed on their way to fight in World War II. This, and the omission of Tommy’s fiancée, significantly redraws the stakes: whereas before he was deciding between the safety of his established relationship and the brief but compelling prospect of his one true love, now he decides between patriotic duty and escapist love, which hollows out a lot of the tension, in my opinion. Maybe I’m not as duty-bound as I ought to be, but I feel like this makes it kind of a no-brainer, right? Patriotism is an abstract idea—a loyalty to a place in space and, if you wanna be a dweeb about it, time. How many nights pass in Brigadoon before the concept of “the United States” that you’re loyal to ceases to be meaningful at all, even if you fought? A week? The love quandary of the original book feels more resonant to me.

That aside, I had a good time at the show. I like the score, it was well-performed, and it’s awfully stirring to have leaves swirling down off the trees at the crescendo. The story is novel even in its simplicity, and I never turn down a chance to catch a slice of history. This was worth the time, just imperfect.