Lost world

NETC attempts to rescue Brigadoon

by Steve Vineberg

Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Loewe. Directed by Tom Saupé. Musical direction by Kallin Johnson. Choreographed by Denise Day. Set designed by Don Ricklin. Lighting by Christopher Gates. Costumes by Polly Flynn. With Robert Gauthier, Kimberly Malone, Charles J. Grigaitis Jr., Jennifer Guzman, Caryn Leib, Sean Higgins, and Anthony Giorgio. A New England Theatre Company production at Anna Maria College, Paxton, through November 6.

Brigadoon, the New England Theatre Company's eighth season opener, was the third collaboration of the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and the composer Frederick Loewe, but no one remembers the first two, What's Up and The Day Before Spring. It was Brigadoon, opening on Broadway in 1947, that made them famous; it launched a triumphant partnership that also produced, over a decade and a half, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Camelot and the film Gigi. (They got together one more time in 1974 to pen the score for Stanley Donen's unhappy movie version of The Little Prince.) The one-two-three punch of My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot defined their approach to writing musicals as witty, stylish, and unconventionally literate. With its array of wistful ballads, Brigadoon sounds like a Fritz Loewe score, but you don't think of the later Alan Jay Lerner as sentimental or whimsical. In feeling if not in form, the show, a fantasy, harks back to the heyday of American operetta in the early decades of the century. (Curiously, two of the few successful fantasies in the history of the American musical played simultaneously on Broadway in 1947; the other was Finian's Rainbow.) It's a very wet and very old-fashioned work that's kept afloat -- barely -- by glorious songs like "The Heather on the Hill," "Almost Like Being in Love," "There But for You Go I," and "From This Day On" -- and by the possibility of building a magical romantic world for the audience. (The Vincente Minnelli movie adaptation, in 1954, was underbudgeted and so failed to create that world.)

Lerner concocted and dramatized the story. Two New Yorkers on a shooting holiday in the Scottish Highlands, Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas (played in the NETC revival by Robert Gauthier and Charles J. Grigaitis Jr., both rather miscast), wander into a quaint town called Brigadoon that doesn't appear on their map. There are no modern conveniences, and the citizens dress and comport themselves as if they'd never encountered the 20th century -- or the 19th. Eventually the Americans learn that Brigadoon's minister arranged for a miracle: at the end of each day, the town goes to sleep for a hundred years. The somewhat elusive logic of this plan is that it would be a blessing to protect Brigadoon from the corrupting touch of the outside world. (No one explains how the villagers are able to maintain any kind of livelihood over these century-long lacunae. Since the miracle would cut off any market exchange beyond the town boundaries, presumably the crops bed down for a hundred years too.) The two intertwined romantic plots involve the MacLaren sisters. Jean (Caryn Leib) is set to marry Charlie Dalrymple (Sean Higgins) that very day, but the bitterness and vengefulness of her rejected suitor, Harry Beaton (Anthony Giorgio), threatens Brigadoon's safety, since if any citizen leaves the town will vanish forever. Meanwhile, Tommy finds himself falling for Jean's older sister Fiona (Kimberly Malone) and discovers that if he loves her enough to give up the rest of the world, he can stay.

The score is sung quite prettily by the cast -- the harmonies in the ensemble numbers are especially pleasing -- though they have to fight the band, which sometimes plays off key and out of tempo. Malone has a particularly sweet voice, and I suspect that with stronger direction she and some of the other principals, chiefly Caryn Leib and Sean Higgins, could give nicely phrased readings of their roles. Unfortunately, there's too much mugging and too little actual acting. The director, Tom Saupé, doesn't seem to have focused on shaping the performances, and there's hardly any staging other than that supplied by the industrious choreographer, Denise Day; the actors just stand around or wander. The winning comic lead, Jennifer Guzman, is done in on her first solo, "The Love of My Life," because she's given literally no physical direction over five long verses.

NETC attempts a big musical every year but because they lack the resources to pull it off I'm always left puzzled. What's the point of doing Brigadoon if you can't carry out the spectacle or make it look magical? There's barely any set at all, and the designer, Don Ricklin, leaves what there is on stage when the play shifts to New York near the end of act two, so that the audience is faced with a Manhattan bar in a little Scottish village. Brigadoon simply isn't a good choice for this group. There are smaller shows the company could try, and as the New York revival of The Most Happy Fella proved a few seasons back, you can retain the charm of some big musicals even without the outsize orchestrations. (That production reduced the instrumentation to twin pianos.) In New York and San Francisco companies revive forgotten musicals in pared-down form, as staged concert productions that concentrate on acting and musical values. Brigadoon has one thrilling moment, when Jose Ramos plays the bagpipes with brio and Meredith Selden dances an impassioned solo; I'd love to see an entire show at NETC that showcased local talent as that number does. A great deal of effort has been expended on this production, but too much of its seems misguided.