Brigadoon is proof musicals are not just about the music

It is 36 years since Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon had a big London production. The story is daft, the characterisation is sketchy – only one song has really lasted. Yet Drew McOnie’s production – his first as artistic director of the Open Air Theatre – beguiles. Fragile, wayward but complete, it floats across Regent’s Park like an iridescent bubble.

Two young American men, roaming the Scottish Highlands in the mid 20th century, come across an enchanted village that, since the 18th century, has existed for only one day every 100 years. They engage with the life of the antique villagers; one of them falls in love. The experience is as fleeting but vivid as a visit to the theatre.

In her new adaptation, Rona Munro – of The James Plays – has made the men bomber pilots who have every reason to want escape. Yet she has not tried to bring the fantasy to earth. This is Scotch mist, with a wry eye on stereotypes.

Design, dance and music create their own world. Pipers and drummers come skirling down the aisles. Basia Bińkowska’s design grows out of the park, with wooden diagonals made for dynamic action; outcrops of rock and tufts of heather are set glowing by Jessica Hung Han Yun’s sympathetic lighting.

Sami Fendall’s costumes are saffron and purple, the colours of gorse and heather, with specially designed tartan, and timeless, freely swinging skirts, like New Look dresses slashed by Vivienne Westwood.

McOnie’s choreography is crucial. There are no rigid chorus kickers. The most balletically bending dancers I have seen for years sweep across the stage – sometimes jigging, sometimes tender – as if they too were part of an animate landscape.

Between heavy mic-ing and a brisk, delicious but occasionally overloud onstage band, words often disappear. Yet there is wonderful resonance from Georgina Onuorah, who blasts away the winsomeness of Waitin’ for My Dearie with her beaming candour; Gilli Jones – his eyes as wide as his smile – has exactly the right elf-like innocence. Nic Myers is radiant as a lusty young woman who sits down as if doing the cancan. The sole famous song is Almost Like Being in Love. As this is.

On the other hand, Irving Berlin’s Top Hat is so rammed with marvellous music and lyrics – Cheek to Cheek, Let’s Face the Music and Dance – that it hardly needs a plot, and hardly has one: the romance hinges on a case of mistaken identity. The trouble with Matthew White and Howard Jacques’s 2012 stage adaptation of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie is that it is haunted by a masterpiece. That is apparent even in this accomplished revival by director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall.

The 1935 film is spectacular and exquisite: everything, from the ostrich feathers in which Rogers nestles, to the shining spaces through which the couple glide, is not so much black and white as dove grey and mother of pearl. The performances shimmer. Dance is not something Astaire does: it happens to him, like a fit of the giggles. Rogers turns on a dime, going from acerbic to doe-eyed with the click of a toe.

The stage version is by comparison bulky and effortful, with colour – Peter McKintosh’s set of spindly cityscapes is heavy on the purple neon – scarcely an enhancement. Marshall more than bowls things along. Her chorus is made up not merely of matching metronomic legs but distinctive individuals. Phillip Attmore sings with a purr and dances nimbly; Lucy St Louis sparks away. Yet Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)? – when the lovers first gambol together – is a damp squib: St Louis is hampered by big riding boots and ungiving breeches.

The knockout number is the duet between Clive Carter and Sally Ann Triplett, the soured couple who fall back into love as they spit out their irritation (“I hate the sofa that you sit upon”). They bring a subtle shade to the evening, much as Elliot Levey and Liza Sadovy did in their elegant performances as the mature couple in Cabaret (2021). Occasionally, in shows as in life, older means not faded but more mellow.

Brigadoon runs at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, until 20 September. Top Hat is at Chichester festival theatre until 6 September

Photographs by Mark Senior/Mark Senior