Brigadoon Program Note

Brigadoon (New Adaptation)

 

I first came to Scotland at eighteen years old, carrying more grief than I knew how to name. I had just lost my father, and in the strange, disorienting way that life sometimes unfolds, I found myself stepping onto a plane bound for Glasgow, where I would begin my training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I did not yet understand what I was walking into—only that something in me needed distance, and perhaps, without knowing it, needed grounding.

 

What I found there was not an escape, but a place. A people. A way of being in which sorrow and joy were not enemies, but neighbors—each given its due. Scotland did not rush me toward healing. It did not offer easy answers. Instead, it offered something far more enduring: community, memory, music, language, and the quiet knowledge that a life is not lived beyond grief, but in its company.

That experience has stayed with me ever since, deepened through my ongoing relationship with the Conservatoire as a member of its International Advisory Board, and it has shaped every line of this adaptation.

Brigadoon has always been a story about longing—for love, for belonging, for a life that feels fully inhabited. But in returning to this piece, I found myself asking different questions. What does it mean to build a life after loss? What do we do with the parts of ourselves that retreat from love in order to survive it? And what does it cost a community to preserve its identity in the face of a world that threatens to erode it?

 

In this version, the familiar story remains—the extraordinary score, the central romance, the mystery of a village out of time—but the world has been deepened and re-rooted. The action unfolds in the present day, and the people of Brigadoon are shaped by a more historically grounded and culturally specific Scottish life: one informed by research into the early 18th century, the Jacobite uprisings, and the lived realities of Highland communities. These are not figures suspended in a dream, but individuals bound together by shared history, sacrifice, and an unspoken agreement to keep one another alive—emotionally, spiritually, and culturally.

 

At the heart of the piece are two men moving in opposite directions. Jeff Douglas, newly widowed, has shut himself off from feeling in order to survive it. Tommy Albright, by contrast, has never fully allowed himself to feel at all—living a life that looks complete from the outside but remains curiously hollow within. I recognize both of them. I recognize the instinct to build walls around the heart, to hold life at arm’s length, to convince oneself that safety is the same as fulfillment, to mistake a well-made life for a lived one. But I also recognize the cost of that choice.

 

Fiona—and the world she inhabits—offers something radical: not escape, but presence. Not perfection, but participation. She asks Tommy, and all of us, a question that feels both ancient and urgent: are we willing to choose a life that is real, even when it demands everything of us?

 

This production has been shaped in profound collaboration with director and choreographer Katie Spelman—my artistic soulmate in every sense of the word—and a company of artists I am deeply honored to call friends. Together, we have tried to build something that feels both faithful and new: a Brigadoon that honors the legacy of Lerner and Loewe while allowing it to speak to a contemporary audience with clarity and urgency.

 

I am endlessly grateful to the Frederick Loewe Foundation and to the Lerner family for entrusting me with this extraordinary material. The American musical is one of our most vital storytelling forms, and to be invited into its lineage in this way is a responsibility I carry with deep humility. This work is, above all, in service—to the artists who came before, to those sharing the stage today, and to you, the audience, who complete the experience. 

If there is a single idea I hope lingers after the final note fades, it is this, included in my stage directions on the very final page: 

WIDOW LUNDIE: Come, lad. 

 

[She extends her hand. In her gesture is both a terrible and tender truth: that while men stumble and falter, sometimes the world does not hold their failure against them. Sometimes the door opens again. And in that opening lies the mystery of grace: that we may be welcomed home, even after we have turned away…]