YMMV / Brigadoon

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Harry Beaton a selfish, entitled git; or is he justifiably upset that he's trapped without his consent in his hometown with his unrequited love? While he's not entitled to Jean, it is fucked up that Mr. Forsythe made provisions for Charlie to return from college, but not for Harry to leave. None of it justifies him knowingly trying to make the town disappear, but it's little wonder he says to hell with it all.
  • Is Jeff a closeted gay man? He mentions having courted women in the past, but given that this is the forties, that could have very well been compulsory heterosexuality. In the present time, he is utterly uninterested in the woman throwing herself at him and very touchy-feely with Tommy. Similarly, is his constant drinking purely comedic, or is he dealing with depression/repressed emotions.
  • All the unseen characters in Mr. Lundie's stories. Wicked "witches" who "put the devil in people" in the 1700s could have just been proto-feminists; while the supposedly kindly minister trapped people in the town forever to "protect them" from the outside world. To a contemporary audience, that's downright oppressive.
• Angst? What Angst?: Considering it hasn't even been two days since the 'miracle' started, everyone in Brigadoon is ridiculously calm about the fact that none of them can ever leave the town again, or else they'll all effectively die. Harry Beaton is the only character we see who's upset about being trapped in the town and everyone else seems to consider his feelings on the matter weird. Possibly justified for a small town in the 1700s, when never leaving your hometown was more common.
• Awesome Music: This musical produced some absolute gems from its song list; perhaps the most notable are "The Heather on the Hill", "There But For You Go I", and the legendary "It's Almost Like Being In Love" (performed here by Broadway legends Kelli O'Hara and Patrick Wilson).
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Sure, Tommy and Fiona have been reunited, but it comes at the cost of Tommy leaving behind everything he's ever known forever, including his best friend Jeff, and given all of the Fridge Horror behind the "miracle" in the first place, whatever Brigadoon's future looks like can't be promising for much longer. Plus, Jeff had previously dismissed his encounter in Brigadoon as a dream as a way of coping with accidentally killing Harry, and now not only does he have irrefutable proof that it's still there, but his best friend leaves him behind to go back to it, so he's going to be struggling with trauma no one could understand.
• Glurge: Some of Fiona's behavior around the story of Brigadoon; constantly gushing about what a great man Mr. Forsythe was; and Lundie's lines about love may make you want to throw up a bit.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The story has a lot of similarities to Outlander, as both stories revolve around some kind of Time Travel Romance in the Scottish Highlands. The years are even the same for the settings, the 1740s and the 1940s.
• Nightmare Fuel: The men of the town end up chasing and battling a desperate Harry Beaton through the woods to prevent him from causing everyone's death, set to a terrifying and frantic soundtrack.
• Jerkass Woobie: Harry Beaton is sour toward most everybody and eventually tries to commit a mass murder-suicide by leaving the town. But he's pretty sympathetic, given that he's stuck in his home village forever with no space to separate him from the woman he loved who married somebody else, and his decision to flee the village is clearly borne more out of desperation and confusion than malice.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Meg is introduced as a major character with a very clear conflict of trying to find love within a small village where she's already gone through most of the men, but despite having two solo songs, she ultimately has no impact on the plot. This is especially notable because Harry has a very similar conflict that drives a good chunk of Act I and the show spends about 10 minutes with Meg trying to seduce Jeff, but any semblance of long-term conflict for Meg's character is left unexplored.
  • The large cast of characters in Brigadoon, several of whom (like Charlie and Jean) are explored pretty thoroughly throughout most of the show, simply exit the show entirely after Harry's funeral. This means that there's no kind of resolution to any of their conflicts or any exploration of their feelings regarding Harry's death, especially for Harry's father (who just lost his son), Jean (who had expressed guilt for his feelings the entire show), and Mr. Lundie (who has just been given firsthand proof that the "miracle" is hurting the town).
• Values Dissonance: Witches being plainly wicked women and the minister being a heroic man for isolating the village from them is a trope that, as of the 2010s and onward, has been deemed paranoid and sexist.
  • There is a revised version of the musical written in 2014 that's been used in a few productions in the US and Canada that completely excises the witches. Instead, the minister prayed for a miracle to save the town from the ravages of the Jacobite War after so many of the men came back dead or broken (physically and psychologically). This is done in parallel with explicitly making Tommy and Jeff World War II veterans. Where the war made Jeff cynical, it made Tommy yearn for something safe and idyllic and romantic, away from all the darkness he's seen on the front, and it also made him question his engagement and impending marriage (he's on his bachelor party trip when he finds Brigadoon in this version).

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