It won't do you a bit of good to know this since there are zero tickets left for the last few performances this weekend…but I had a wonderful time last night visiting Brigadoon. This is the Reprise! revival up at the Freud Playhouse up at U.C.L.A., which like all Reprise! revivals, re-creates some great musical with minimal sets and rehearsal but maximum talent. The show in this case is the 1947 Broadway offering by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe all about a mysterious city in Scotland that pops into existence every hundred years. A glorious cast (including Jason Danieley, Marin Mazzie, Larry Cedar, Deborah Gibson and Orson Bean) more than did justice to the wonderful Lerner-Loewe score. Danieley and Mazzie stopped the show with "Almost Like Being in Love" and it was one of those thrilling moments when the audience is clapping its fool head off, thanking the actors for an unexpected tingle. If this production ran a few more weeks, I'd probably go back to see it again, if only for that one number.
'Twas especially nice to see Orson Bean trodding the boards again. He played Ben Franklin a year or three ago in the Reprise! version of 1776 but this time, he actually looked like Orson Bean. If you get past the silly stage name, Orson Bean is one of the great treasures of show business — an extremely witty man who's had a long, successful career. It would have been even more successful if not for the Blacklist but he overcame that by merely surviving and continuing to do fine work. (It just this moment dawned on me that maybe there was a subtle joke to them casting him as Franklin. That role in 1776 was originated by Howard da Silva, one of the more notoriously blacklisted actors. Funny I never made that connection until just now.)
Everyone else in the show was good, too. Wish you could see it. Heck, I wish I could see it again.