Brigadoon review – Strange fable feels out of step with the times, however beguiling its dance may be

Director and choreographer Drew McOnie’s outdoor revival of the 1947 musical Brigadoon opens with just the kind of stirring moment you’d expect from this retro Scottish fantasia. Stoic bagpipers send discordant notes crashing through the air, drums quicken the audience’s heartbeats, and a waterfall pours from a lavishly naturalistic set evoking Highland moors. When I see it, the clouds even oblige with a little authentic drizzle. How fitting for an atmospheric but overly misty-eyed take on a classic.

This is McOnie’s first production at the helm of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and it’s easy to see why he plumped for it. There are abundant opportunities for the dance scenes that made his name, and he lovingly recreates and reimagines golden age Hollywood choreographer Agnes de Mille’s balletic sequences of yearning and skittish flirtation. Lerner and Loewe’s score is sumptuously romantic, too, and beautifully rendered here by a sizeable orchestra placed centre stage. As night falls, this outdoorsy story seeps gorgeously into the woodland backing the stage and the darkening sky above it.

Still, no amount of sylvan magic can hide the fact that this is a very, very silly kind of story. The 1954 film was marred by Scottish accents so atrociously inauthentic they made cinema’s worst cockney Dick Van Dyke seem like he was born within the sound of Bow Bells, weaned on jellied eels and schooled at Fagin’s illustrious academy for cheeky chappies. It was a thoroughly American vision of the Highlands, full of lavish pageantry and rugged kilt-wearing lads chasing flighty, sexually available lassies. Here, McOnie pares back the kitsch by adding a new, darker framing. The two men who stumble on the town of Brigadoon are not just tourists but wounded Second World War airmen, and the characters they meet could well be figments of their war-torn imaginations. Scottish playwright Rona Munro tweaks the book to give some poetic darkness to the role of cynical Jeff (Cavan Clarke) – while maintaining the dreamy naivety of Tommy (Louis Gaunt), who immediately falls for local girl Fiona (Danielle Fiamanya).

But there’s something odd afoot in this picturesque, suspiciously friendly town. The musical’s first half is an agonisingly slow buildup to the big revelation: Brigadoon didn’t appear on the airmen’s maps because (spoiler alert) it’s not really there. Most of the time, anyway. As war came to the 18th-century Highlands, a spell made the town vanish, to reappear once a century. Weirder still, each 100 years in the real world is only a day in Brigadoon, a choice with some deeply messed-up implications that’ll fry your brain if you think them through. Still, why worry your pretty head? Here are magical scenes of the townsfolk gathering lilac drifts of heather as twilight blooms, dressed in pastel-perfect confections of pink tartan and chartreuse flounces designed by Sami Fendall. Numbers like “Almost Like Being in Love” and “Waiting for My Dearie” are full of wistfulness and longing, while Nic Myers has a huge amount of fun with the role of frisky Meg, who steals Jeff’s shoes in an attempt to trap him in her bed.

After the interval, this world starts to unravel in darker scenes that clash oddly with what’s come before. McOnie dodges the implications of a jarring moment of sexual assault and brutal punishment by making the perpetrator a baby-faced boy. And a tweaked ending lands a little strangely, too: perhaps the magic here isn’t heightened enough to make sense of this story’s dream-like logic.

This Brigadoon has had a facelift to make it attractive to a 21st-century British audience that knows that Scotland’s a real place, not a nostalgic outlet for their tartan-clad fantasies. But underneath, its tired bones still creak. It’s a strange fable that feels out of step with the times, however beguiling its dance may be.

On at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until 20 September; tickets here