Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
August 18, 2025
As dusk falls in London’s Regent’s Park, the ivy-clad theatre blends seamlessly into the trees around it. The air cools, lights begin to glow, and the open-air stage quietly transforms into a threshold between London and the mist-bound village of Brigadoon.
This revival of Lerner & Loewe’s classic musical is the first major production of the musical in London in thirty-five years. Directed and choreographed by artistic director of Regent’s Park Open-Air Theatre Drew McOnie, with book adaptation by Rona Munro, musical direction by Laura Bangay, set design by Basia Bińkowska, and orchestrations by Sarah Travis, the creative team together breathe new life into this legendary tale.
Photo Mark Senior
The story is a little darker than the original thanks in part to Munro setting it during rather than after the Second World War. The two outsiders who find themselves in the titular mysterious village that only appears for one day every hundred years, are now crash-landed fighter pilots Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas (Louis Gaunt and Cavan Clarke), searching for a way home.
The set is breathtaking: sloped wooden platforms dressed with grass and wildflowers merge into the surrounding woodland, so that Regent’s Park becomes the Highlands themselves. In the final scene, as Tommy, the outsider, struggles between love and reality, a real plane passes overhead and leaves scatter from the trees. Nature and theatre colliding in perfect illusion.
Photo Mark Senior
McOnie’s dance drives the production, with sweeping ensemble sections, duets, and shifting formations that dazzle the eye. It entwines folk rhythm with theatrical drama, making the story pulse through movement itself. Most unforgettable is the funeral dance to live bagpipes: a woman in white, hair loose, hurling her grief into extensions, leaps, backward glances. When her final cry rang out, the audience held its breath; no one could remain untouched.
The musicians deserve special mention, above all the pipers. Without their mournful drone, Brigadoon would lose its soul.
In an age of speed and distraction, Brigadoon reminds us that some dreams are worth pausing to protect. More than a love story, it is a hymn to shared human longing.
Brigadoon runs at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London until September 14, 2025.