I don't understand [it] myself," the woman behind me in the floorength mink coat said to her companion as we all left the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. "At some point in my life I liked it."
We had just sat through almost three hours of the New York City Opera's production of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, and, apart from "Fritz" Loewe's meltingly beautiful music, the production was all kinds of awful. It's not that opera singers are unequipped to handle musicals, or that musicals are too lowbrow for their talents. (The lines of distinction between opera, operetta, and musical have become by this time thoroughly blurred.) Rather, one of the key problems with opera singers generally, and with this production specifically, is that most opera singers can't act. Their focus is on their voices: producing those golden, plangent tones. It's ludicrous for them to spout dialogue in execrable Scottish brogues (despite the efforts of dialect coach Luke Yankee) only to drop all semblance of both brogue and character when the orchestra launches into a song's opening bars. Then they turn straight out to the audience, assume that fixed gaze of the concert performer, and adopt the highwayman's approach to art: "Stand and Deliver!"
What this procedure does to the logic of a scene or a character is better imagined than described. Opera buffs, through centuries of conditioning, shrug off this state of affairs. If they do get some reality up there on the stage as, say, with a Maria Calls, it is icing on the cake. Since the plots of most operas defy plausibility, being based for the most part on trumpery of the turn of the century, realism is not the chief mode of this form of art.
On the other hand, musicals since Oklahoma! Have striven to integrate songs, dances, and dialogue into one continuously flowing story, presumably plausible. Now Brigadoon was written forty years ago, when this integrated concept was still new, so it shows its heritage of European operetta in such songs as the lovely duet, "From This Day On." Its other songs sometimes advance the story but often seem stuck in as set pieces.
Agnes De Mille's original choreography, here recreated by James Jamieson, is most often ridiculous and embarrassing. It is filled with affectation and mannerisms, especially many meaningless hand gestures. De Mille sought to marry classical ballet to a Highlands folk idiom, but came up with a pretentious set of pieces, most of which echoed her work on Oklahoma!. About the best that could be said for her choreography is that her idiosyncratic style was distinctive, if not effective. Time after time her work reflected the same limited movement vocabulary. Her solo pieces, as in the funeral scene, harked back to the "interpretive dances" of the 1920s and 1930s.
Apparently somebody made an artistic decision to handle this entire production as though it were lifted bodily out of a museum case and put on display, still exuding the fusty air of something too long out of circulation. Why this should be is a mystery, since Brigadoon, with its plot of a Scottish town reappearing every century out of the Highland mists, and a wholesome love story which makes the jaded modern smart set seem pale, is one of the most frequently revived musicals.
Director Gerald Freedman, who once staged a cunning commedia del l'arte version of The Taming of
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