We BrigaDID it.

Our brand new Brigadoon is open.

For nearly three years, this piece existed mostly in private: in notes apps and rehearsal rooms, in half-finished thoughts, in airports and 3 a.m. emails and long walks and seemingly impossible hope. For years it was fueled by a kind of delusional optimism and unearned confidence of, like, a gold prospector? 

 

All to say: I started all of this medium-unhinged because who was I to think that one can simply rewrite a classic musical and emerge psychologically unchanged? 

And then somehow—impossibly, like Brigadoon itself—it all became real.

What moves me most is not that this adaptation exists. 

It’s that it exists because of people. 

Of community. 

Of a love and respect for art-form and one another.

To Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate, our director, choreographer leader and my counterpART. We dreamed this thing together and built it with the strange faith that sometimes exists between two people before there is evidence. (Which feels very “Mr Forsythe” of us…) This world is tattooed with both our fingerprints. 

Danny Feldman and everyone at Pasadena Playhouse took a chance on two women steering a beloved giant and gave us room to imagine. Endless gratitude to the Lerner Family and the Loewe Foundation for this incredible honor, and all of the inspirations imagined and practical (you know who you are).

And then there are the friends. 

Old friends. 

Very old friends.  

Forever friends.  

New friends. 

Colleagues. 

All-grown-up students. 

Mentors. 

Collaborators. 

Heroes. 

People from every era of my little tiny artistic life appearing at exactly the right chapter to breathe life into these beautiful people and gorgeous town, that once only existed in my imagination...

A special thank you to my patient and inspired husband Alec, the ever-inspiring MamaSilbs, thank you for loving me through the glamorous process known as “watching someone stare silently into middle distance and call it work...”

 

Theatre is never made alone. It is created and consumed in community.

 

I feel very small beneath the size of my gratitude—and very lucky to stand among such giants. 

We all, BrigaDID it.