In the acclaimed revival of “Brigadoon” now playing at Pasadena Playhouse, Tyne Daly is by far the marquee name, as the “Cagney & Lacey” star appears as the Widow Lundie, a role that got a gender switch from the character’s original incarnation as a Mr. Lundie. She’s not on stage a great deal, compared to the romantic leads whose coming-together she helps facilitate in the classic Lerner & Loewe musical-fantasy. But don’t imagine that Daly using her backstage breaks to sneak across the street to browse at Vromans or any other such diversion. She’s attentive even during her time off during the show, even if she can only hear it and not see it from her backstage berth.
“I listen to the play, every night,” Daly says. “I’m very old-fashioned. There’s no room backstage, but they have little stools for me and I can sit and listen to how each scene goes, how each number goes over.” She has just one explanation for this nightly focus on what’s happening even when she’s out of the action: It’s “because I love storytelling.”
Audiences are loving listening to Daly — as well as seeing her, of course — as she affects a Scottish brogue, playing a woman who comes about as close as the town of Brigadoon has to an official leader. The village is idyllic enough that it doesn’t seem to require a government — just a historian, which is an important role when you have to explain to outsiders who accidentally stumble in just how it is that they have landed in a place that only appears out of the mist once every hundred years. It also falls to her to remind the romantic leads about the virtues of love and sacrifice, in a denouement that just about ensures the mist will have made its way into any audience member’s yes.
