The stage was full of antique furniture and technology. Is that a gramophone? Wow. It is a gramophone. I’m already excited, and I haven’t even sat down yet.
The set from Blithe Spirit transports the audience to another era — the era in which Noël Coward wrote this classic comedy: the Jazz Age. Set designer Amanda Bearrs and scenic painter Rebekah Lazaridis have done beautiful work here. The walls are papered in a shade of green that has long since fallen out of fashion. Paintings on the walls include a custom-made portrait of Scott Swenson and Betty-Jane Parks as Charles and Ruth Condomine. Everything you’d need or want to entertain guests is here: a chair, a sofa, a wet bar, a coffee table for cocktails and afternoon tea, a baby grand piano, and more than one vase of flowers.
The play begins with the maid, Edith, entering the room carrying a tray of martini glasses. The Condomines have invited the Bradfords to dinner, and Edith is making the preparations. But this is not your average dinner party. Charles has also invited a medium, Madame Arcati, to join in. He’s hoping she’ll be a terrific fraud, and thus good inspiration for his upcoming book. But what if she’s not a fraud?
It’s no secret that ghosts are real in Coward’s Blithe Spirit — as real and as problematic as they are in Ghostbusters. They’re also fucking hilarious.
The fun begins when Madame Arcati conjures up Charles’s first wife — the mischievous, sexy-as-hell Elvira. And only Charles can see and hear her. As you might imagine, this isn’t great for his current marriage to Ruth.
A couple of slightly dysfunctional marriages would have been enough material for a good comedy on their own. Add a medium and a ghost, and now you’ve got a great comedy. Now you have a classic. Factor in the superb set, fantastic acting and winsome costumes, and you can’t go wrong.
Scott Swenson is brilliant as Charles, and he has excellent chemistry with both of his onstage wives. Charles’s frustration with his present situation manages to be believable and funny all at once. Lauren Buglioli commands the stage as Charles’ first wife, Elvira, with her talent for physical comedy. And as Madame Arcati, Rosemary Orlando is practically a one-woman show during the medium's séance. Everyone else looks on in shock and awe, still not sure if Madame Arcati is for real, but she certainly is entertaining.
From the moment Madame Arcati conjures up Charles’s first wife, I laugh my ass off. With both his wives in the same room, Charles is subjected to a double dose of what your grandfather might call feminine wiles. This play was written by a man in the 1940s, so naturally, women are a bit of a pain in the ass here. Get ready for some crying and hysterics. Noël Coward’s women often come off as caricatures, but that’s all part of the comedy. And don’t forget that the word hysteria is derived from the Greek hysterikós (“suffering in the womb”), and arose from the misguided belief that only women are prone to emotional excess. Keep this misguided belief in mind for those moments when Charles gets totally hysterical.
Keeping Blithe Spirit faithful to the time and place it was written couldn’t have been easy. The actors had to put on vintage fashions and British accents. And where does one acquire a gramophone these days?
It may not be easy to produce, but when everything comes together right, Blithe Spirit can be extraordinarily funny. Don’t miss its latest incarnation at Stageworks Theatre.
They do it right.
This article appears in Jun 7-14, 2018.