It’s Almost Like Being in Love With a Fantasy ‘Brigadoon,’ a Musical Revival at the Goodman Theater
Charles IsherwoodJuly 14, 2014: Brigadoon, the musical about a Scottish town that lives for a day only to disappear for a century, may be in danger of achieving a similar evanescence. Although it was the first hit show from one of the American musical theater’s most successful teams — Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who went on to write My Fair Lady and Camelot — this early romantic fantasy has faded to the fringes of the repertoire, and has not been seen on Broadway since 1981. At the Goodman Theater here, the musical has been given a first-class revival that boasts an infectious buoyancy of spirit and a welcome absence of postmodern flourishes. It’s almost like being back in 1947, when the show opened to become one of the most beloved musicals of the era. (It was filmed in 1954, with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.) The kilts flap and fly, the bagpipes pipe away, and rapturous music, including the show’s signature song, “Almost Like Being in Love,” flows forth from start to finish. Most gratifyingly, the production makes you feel that the director and choreographer, Rachel Rockwell, loves this musical as dearly and sincerely as any other, and feels no need to offer any blushing apology for its deep-dyed romanticism. It would not be easy to do much radical tinkering with Brigadoon in any case, although the book has been revised by Brian Hill. The Scottish atmosphere that some may regard as rib-ticklingly kitschy is inextricably woven into the music and the story line, lying as thickly over the proceedings as the mist that shrouds the town of Brigadoon when two American hunters lost in the highlands stumble upon it during the one day in the 20th century that it springs back to life. (The story behind the town’s peculiar fate has been changed in Mr. Hill’s version, to emphasize the 18th-century strife in Scotland that the people of Brigadoon sought to escape when the village first did its disappearing act.)
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