Coward Spirits

Giving up the ghost in Stockbridge

by Steve Vineberg

HIGH SPIRITS, by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray. Based on Blithe Spirit, by Noel Coward. Directed by Larry Carpenter. Choreographed by Daniel Pelzig. Musical direction by Lawrence Yurman. Set design by James Noone. Costumes by Lindsay W. Davis. Lighting by Phil Monat. With Tamara Tunie, Casey Biggs, Mary Lou Rosato, and Lauren Mitchell. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival through July 5.

High Spirits, a musical reworking of Noel Coward's supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit, opened on Broadway in 1964 and has seldom been produced since. I saw the original production as a teenager, but I remember just two things about it. One is the incomparable daffiness of Beatrice Lillie in the role of the medium, Madame Arcati, who unwittingly conjures up the ghost of a mystery writer's long-dead first wife. The other is the way Tammy Grimes, as the seductive ectoplasm, Elvira, slinked about the stage and sang her numbers in a scratched-velvet alto, tossing away the lyrics like cigarette butts.

Seeing the musical again three and a half decades later at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, I have to say it's relatively witless. Blithe Spirit isn't among Coward's best plays, despite its inflated reputation, but the few alterations adapters Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray make to the original, like the ending, are worse -- errors in judgment. The score by Martin and Gray has one lovely ballad, "If I Gave You," one pleasing up-tempo duet, "I Know Your Heart," and nothing else of distinction. But I really don't think the show can be half as bad as Larry Carpenter's clunker of a production for the Berkshire Theatre Festival makes it seem. Carpenter's main contribution to High Spirits is to back the four principals -- Casey Biggs as the writer, Charles Condomine; Tamara Tunie as Elvira; Mary Lou Rosato as Madame Arcati; and Lauren Mitchell as Charles's present wife, Ruth -- with half a dozen spectral presences who drift awkwardly around James Noone's threadbare set, adding exactly nothing to the dramatic proceedings. And the ersatz-'40s scat-and-close-harmony arrangements (by Lawrence Yurman) of the songs the characters are asked to sing add just about the same to the musical experience of the evening.

Lindsay W. Davis's costumes are failed high camp. His notion is that everyone beyond the reaches of the mortal world is reborn in some combo of white and gold, but I don't understand why one of the "Heavenly Host" wears a beret polka-dotted with what looks like gold-dipped absorbent cotton, or why another one is decked out in a kind of abbreviated farthingale with a hat that suggests a white nest with gold eggs half-concealed in it. Elvira wears a gold hooded cape with a silver Marie Antoinette gown that cuts off below the waist to reveal a pair of gold toreador pants like Slinky toys. These must be the most hideous clothes I've ever seen on a stage -- though I'd be lying if I said they didn't hold my attention.

The four leading performers try very hard to bring some style to the production -- especially Lauren Mitchell, whose Ruth is a brittle stringbean of a woman who handles a cigarette as if it were a wand. Mary Lou Rosato works up quite a sweat: her Arcati is in the horsy-English mold of Margaret Rutherford, who played the dotty diviner in David Lean's 1945 film of the Coward play, only twice as manic. Neither of these women is successful, finally, and the same is true of Tamara Tunie and Casey Biggs, but I don't think any of the actors should bear the blame for the disaster, since Carpenter appears to have no more idea how to direct them than he has a notion of how to stage the ghost-chorus people. The show's single virtue is that it's completely consistent: not one single moment in it works.