The Encores! series has gone back to its roots.
In recent seasons, the musical revivals it has presented in semi-concert form are well-known titles that occasionally make the transfer to Broadway; “Ragtime” at Lincoln Center being the most recent example, the long-running “Chicago” being the most notable.
On Wednesday, the rarely revived 1964 Broadway musical “High Spirits” opened at New York City Center. An unlikely fan of the original show was the author of the musical’s source material, the 1941 comedy “Blithe Spirit,” by Noël Coward, who went on to direct “High Spirits” with some uncredited help from Gower Champion. Huge chunks of Coward’s play appear in Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray’s book about a husband who must cope with his dead wife’s ghost when she is conjured up by a wacky medium, Madame Arcati, at a séance.
When plays are turned into movies, screenwriters often feel the urge to open them up, adding scenes that give variety to the setting. Martin and Gray did that with “Blithe Spirit,” and in “High Spirits,” the major beneficiary is that comedy’s most vivid character, Arcati. In the musical, we see her riding a bike on the street (“The Bicycle Song”), hanging out with fellow beatniks at a funky café (“Go Into Your Trance”) and in bed making love to her ouija board (“Talking to You”). These songs, as well as the rest of the sometimes jazzy score by Martin and Gray, are the kind of light pop razzmatazz that Broadway served up routinely in the 1960s. And they are jarringly out of tune with the dry wit of Coward’s original dialogue.
When it comes up on TCM, I’ve tried a few times to watch David Lean’s 1945 film version of “Blithe Spirit,” starring Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford, and I’ve never made it to the end. My opinion of the original source material is not high. Martin and Gray performed no great act of sacrilege with their musical Americanization of classic British material. In this tussle of sung music and spoken words, the staged songs win hands down. Andrea Martin plays a fraudulent medium on the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” and she is just as engagingly over the top here as Madame Arcati. Each of her songs is a fun showstopper, and Katrina Lenk brings real sizzle to “You’d Better Love Me” and “Talking to You” in the role of the exceedingly alluring dead wife Elvira.
Even though “High Spirits” is a nearly forgotten antique, Encores! has cast it with flair, bringing real Broadway stars to the stage. In addition to Lenk (“The Band’s Visit”) and Martin (tons of stuff), there’s Steven Pasquale (“The Bridges of Madison County”) and Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) in the roles of the husband and wife whose stiff-upper-lip marriage disintegrates under Elvira’s laser-focused high-jinks. Playing the very British couple, Pasquale and Soo are cast against type and can be thankful that “High Spirits” is a limited engagement.
Campbell Scott rounds out the high-profile cast as the couple’s good friend Dr. Bradman. He also plays Noël Coward in this “concert adaptation,” by Billy Rosenfield, in which the author reads his own stage directions.
Jessica Stone directs.
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