By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“Brigadoon” may well have been the first show I covered as a reporter. It was in Montpelier Vermont in 1980. A community theater was staging it in the high school auditorium. That’s as much as I remember. While it wasn’t a 100 years ago, it was a long time ago. That story has mercifully been lost in the mist of time.
The Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical is durable. Keith Hofacker, long-time technical director at the College of Musical Arts, said the current production is the fourth at BGSU.
The BGSU Opera Theater is staging “Brigadoon” Friday at 8 p.m. . and Sunday at 3 p.m. in Kobacker Hall. Tickets are $10 general admission. Click to purchase.
The musical was presented most recently in 1995 under the auspices of the Summer Musical Theater.
Robin McEwen played the female lead of Fiona. These community productions often featured whole families. So, her son and daughter, Reid and Heather, were in the large chorus of townspeople, and husband and father, Scott McEwen was in the cello section of the orchestra.
Robin McEwen died in the summer of 1998. Geoff Stephenson, who played Jeff in 1995 and who directs the current production, is dedicating show to Robin’s memory. “She was just incandescent, and one of the most beautiful voices and sincere actresses I had seen to that time. Here we are, 28 years later, on the same stage, and I just thought it was appropriate to honor her memory with this production.”
He also encourages people to donate to the College of Music scholarship in her name.
The production is a fitting tribute – Heather, now Heather Goldman, and her son McEwen Goldman are now among the Brigadoon townsfolk.
Because of a spell cast by a minister on Brigadoon to save it from evil, the villagers go to sleep and when they wake it is 100 years later. They come to life for a day picking up all the joy and drama from the day 100 years before. That spell was cast in 1746. Now in 1946, two sophisticated New York lads Tommy Albright (Matthew Steele) and Jeff Douglas (Trey Kratz) get lost while hunting in the Highlands and happen upon the village.
Being a musical, complications and romance and lots of dancing ensue.
This happens to be the day on which Jean MacClaren (Claire Oliver) is to marry Charlie Dalrymple (Andrew Puschel)) much to the dismay of Harry Beaton (Alejandro Alvarez).
The townspeople and the New Yorkers find each other equally strange though Meg (Finleigh Klein) finds in Jeff another in a long line of candidates in her quest to find “The Love of My Life.”
Jean’s sister Fiona (Emma Clark) meanwhile offers hospitality to Tommy, though they disagree on everything. He and Jeff believe the townsfolk are delusional folk living as if it was 200 years ago.
Still a certain bond tugs Fiona and Tommy together. This blossoms as they wander through and gather “The Heather on the Hill.”
The young singers do justice the Loewe’s marvelous score, which is backed by the dual pianos of music director Kevin Bylsma and Nate Leonard. If you don’t come out with one of these melodies wafting through your brain, I just don’t know what to say.
The dancing, choreographed by Tracy Wilson, projects the hamlet’s sense of community.
Puschel is wonderful as Charlie, who seems a lovable rogue,now besotted with love as expresses in “I’ll Go Home to Bonnie Jean.” His rival Harry (Alejandro Alvarez) lurks about the stage, sullen and full of discontent, someone who could disrupt the idyllic life in “Brigadoon.” The fetching Maggie Anderson (Melissa Rider) can’t pull him from his despair. Rider, who serves as dance captain, demonstrates her artful dancing in a solo set to the mournful wail of Kim Johnson’s bagpipes.
Klein is wonderful as the woman who seems to be enjoying the long search for the right man projecting her freewheeling, ribald personality in “My Mother’s Wedding Day.”
Also in the cast is voice professor Christopher Scholl. Aside from a few measures in the prelude, we don’t get to enjoy his wonderful tenor. What he demonstrates are his skills as an actor. As Mr. Lundie the schoolmaster, he tells the story of how Brigadoon came to be. This recitation of the backstory could be deadly. But he pulls the audience in just as surely as Mr. Lundie pulls in his listeners – Jeff, Tommy, and Fiona, and just as “Brigadoon,” for over 75 years, has pulled audiences into its magical world. It’s a place that’s always worth revisiting.
