4 days ago
Why did we ignore this glorious classic musical for 35 years?
If there is to be a revival of Lerner and Loewe's unrepentantly whimsical 1947 musical – and there hasn't been one in London for 35 years – then Regent's Park Open Air Theatre is the place to do it. Known primarily through the 1954 film starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, Brigadoon has enchantment in its bones, demanding its audience buy into the idea of a magical Highland village that emerges from the mist for just one day every 100 years.
That is considerably easier to do with an outdoor venue in which the falling dusk during evening performances is an inbuilt part of the scenery. And if Drew McOnie's effervescent yet punchy production – the first he has directed since taking over the venue this year – relies on admittedly flimsy source material, then so be it. This show is delightful.
There's a hint of Powell and Pressburger's 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death to Rona Munro 's new adaptation, which accentuates the musical's Second World War setting by changing the two American men who find themselves lost in rural Scotland on May Day, 1945, from hunters to shot-down pilots.
Is the idyllic village that suddenly appears to them, with its indefatigably happy residents blissfully unaware of the war (indeed, they have no concept of modernity at all), the hallucination of Tommy and Jeff, who are badly damaged by the horrors they have witnessed on the battlefield? Or have the pilots willed the village into being as an alternative to the prospect of dying on the hills before they can be saved? Either way, Munro subtly reinforces the idea of fantasy as a self-protective mechanism by suggesting the village itself originally 'disappeared' in order to escape the 1745 Jacobite uprising.
Reality and dream co-exist in both uneasy and bewitching ways in this sensitive update, even as it unapologetically rests on Lerner's undeniably barmy book in which the wounded Tommy falls in love with local girl Fiona (a winning Danielle Fiamanya; she shares the role with Georgina Onuorah) whom he is to lose at midnight when the village vanishes, unless he commits himself to living in Brigadoon forever.
McOnie's production retains Brigadoon's old-fashioned MGM musical quality with beautifully choreographed Oklahoma! -style scenes of swirling village women in full skirts and lace-up boots, and men merrily loading wagons with milk churns, images that knowingly lean into the idea of the art form itself as escapism incarnate.
Loewe's score is pure romance, too, with its swooning harmonies led by filigree fiddles, the melodies unashamedly pretty. Basia Binkowska's set, with its sloping wood-clad walls and inclines, bears an unfortunate resemblance to a provincial ecology centre, but the pink and blue hue of the lights and the abundance of gorse and heather provide twinkling compensation, as does powerful use of a couple of pipers, particularly during a desolate funeral scene.
There are some fine performances – notably from Gilli Jones as a puppyish Charlie and Jasmine Jules Andrews as Fiona's spirted sister Jean, whose marriage the villagers are celebrating. There is darkness, too, in the subsumed violence of an en pointe sword dance, and in Danny Nattrass's performance as the embittered Harry, desperately, unhappily in love with Jean. He provides a haunting counterfoil to the utopian happiness the village supposedly embodies. And as that dusk falls, Munro's ending neatly resolves the plot, while leaving a few unsettling questions lingering in the night air.
At Regent's Park Open Air Theatre until Sept 20
