What happens in Brigadoon?
Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas are two Americans hiking in the Scottish Highlands. In Rona Munro's 2025 adaptation they were reframed as Second World War fighter pilots who had crash-landed off course, lost and miles from anywhere familiar. As dusk falls they hear distant music — drums and pipes — and find themselves at the edge of a village that wasn't on their map.
The miracle of Brigadoon
The village is preparing for a wedding. Tommy meets Fiona MacLaren and feels something immediate; Jeff, more cynical and hung-over, meets her sister Jean. As the day goes on, the Americans piece together that something is wrong: the villagers' clothes, their phrases, the way they treat news of the outside world. Eventually the village schoolmaster tells them the truth. Two hundred years earlier, the local minister had asked God for a miracle to protect his village from a darkening world. The miracle granted was that Brigadoon would disappear into the mists and reappear for only one day every hundred years. To the villagers, only a day has passed since the last time. To the world, a century.
The choice
The rule of the miracle is absolute: anyone who leaves the village before the day ends breaks the spell, and Brigadoon disappears forever. Tommy is the outsider who has fallen in love. Fiona is the woman whose entire world will vanish at sundown unless he stays — and unless he stays, he must leave forever. The act break came on Tommy's decision; the second act took it back, twice. The 2025 production gave Fiona considerably more agency in this dilemma than the original; she was not waiting to be chosen, she was deciding whether to want him.
The ending
Without giving away the precise final beats: Lerner's original ending leans into the romantic fairy-tale; Munro's adaptation kept the core resolution intact but framed it with more ambiguity, allowing the audience to read it as either a happy ending or a sadder, stranger one. Reviewers were divided on which reading they preferred; most agreed the rewrite made the choice feel earned.
The history of Brigadoon and the 2025 revival
Lerner & Loewe in 1947
Brigadoon was Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's first major hit, premiering on Broadway in March 1947. It ran for 581 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Choreography for Agnes de Mille, whose dance sequences — particularly the wedding dance and the chase — became famous enough to be revived in their own right. The original London production opened at Her Majesty's Theatre in April 1949 with George Canaan and Patricia Hughes. The show was filmed by MGM in 1954 with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, in a heavily revised version that reset much of the action and is generally regarded as less successful than the stage piece.
The 35-year London absence
After a major revival at the Victoria Palace in 1988, Brigadoon vanished from London. The reasons were partly fashion — golden-age musicals fell out of producer favour in the 1990s and 2000s — and partly the show's inherent difficulties: a large cast, a complex score, a tonally tricky book, and a setting that requires either a real commitment to scale or a clever rethink. Regional and amateur productions continued throughout, but the show did not return to a major London stage for 35 years.
Drew McOnie's first season
Drew McOnie was appointed Artistic Director of Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in January 2024, succeeding Timothy Sheader. His debut 2025 season opened with Shucked (UK premiere), continued with Noughts and Crosses adapted by Dominic Cooke, and concluded with Brigadoon — a programme that deliberately balanced new American musicals, contemporary British drama, and a classical revival that gave McOnie a chance to direct and choreograph from scratch. The Brigadoon revival was announced in January 2025 with Rona Munro's adaptation as the headline creative decision.
Rona Munro's adaptation
Munro is one of Scotland's most decorated playwrights; her James Plays trilogy for the National Theatre of Scotland won the Evening Standard Award and the Lerner Plays the right to be reframed by a Scottish voice rather than an American one. Her adaptation kept Loewe's music and Lerner's lyrics untouched but reworked the book substantially. The most-noted changes: Fiona and Jean became co-protagonists with more interiority and political awareness, the village's miracle was framed with a darker historical context, and the Americans' arrival was rewritten as a wartime crash-landing rather than a hunting trip.
The cast and creative team
Danielle Fiamanya (Otherland at the Almeida) and Georgina Onuorah (The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium, Shucked at the same theatre that same summer) shared Fiona. Louis Gaunt (Mary Poppins) played Tommy. The wider company included Cavan Clarke, Jasmine Jules Andrews, Edward Baruwa, Norman Bowman, Chrissy Brooke, David Colvin, Gilli Jones, Anne Lacey, Nic Myers, and Danny Nattrass. The production design and the musical direction were by the Open Air Theatre's regular collaborators. The run played 2 August – 20 September 2025 and closed as scheduled.
