Review: High Spirits, a Deliriously Charming Musical Séance for the Old Encores!

Broadway in 1964-65 was crowded with musicals that have not faded into obscurity: it was the year of Funny Girl and She Loves Me and Hello, Dolly! These shows weren’t all hits, but they’ve managed to endure in a way that one of the season’s also-rans, a musical adaptation of Noël Coward’s daffy ghost story, Blithe Spirit, has not. High Spirits, with book, music, and lyrics by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray, vanished into the ether after 375 performances. Today, it doesn’t even register as a curio in the way that Anyone Can Whistle and 110 in the Shade, two other shows that came and went that season, still manage to do.

That makes High Spirits ripe for the New York City Center Encores! treatment, and director Jessica Stone is giving it the Encores! production of its dreams. Unlike many post-Covid Encores! outings, which turned the series into a none-too-subtle springboard for Broadway, High Spirits goes gloriously old school. The cast is fully on book (oh, how I’ve missed the binders), the lyrics are occasionally la-la’ed, the orchestra sounds great playing a collection of 60-year-old showtunes that might as well be brand new, and masterstroke line readings feel so spur-of-the-moment that they take everyone onstage by surprise before the house dissolves into hysterics. Not since No, No, Nanette in 2009 have I had such an unabashedly good time at an Encores! show.

As a property, High Spirits is equally uninterested in being something it’s not. As frothy as Coward’s original, it follows mystery writer Charles Condomine (Steven Pasquale), who finds himself haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Katrina Lenk), after a séance led by the dippy medium Madame Arcati (Andrea Martin). Charles promptly falls back in love with Elvira, while his second wife, Ruth (Phillipa Soo), keeps getting in the way.

High Spirits didn’t win any Tonys. It’s most famous song only ever made it to a B-side. It seems to vanish as you watch it, and therein lies the charm. You’re discovering a delicious piece of ephemera you’ve never seen before and never will again, while realizing what a witty, pleasurable party it is. This is Encores! at its very best, buoyed by a perfect ensemble of actors who are very clearly having as good a time as we are.

The performances don’t cut especially deep, but they get the point across in appropriately broad strokes. Pasquale is in Basil Fawlty mode, a petulantly fussy Brit, and he has first-rate chemistry with both Soo, his real-life spouse playing Charles’s uptight living wife, and Lenk as his ethereally sexy dead one. Soo reveals a heretofore unexplored gift for physical comedy, the kind that makes you wonder where it’s been hiding all these years. And Lenk, decked out in a silver evening gown with matching makeup (simple costumes by Jennifer Moeller, more advanced makeup by Katie Gell), seems to float on air the whole time.

As the medium, Andrea Martin unleashes her full, glorious Andrea Martin, high-kicking and crotch-punching her way through a series of séances, before breaking into a second-act soft-shoe with her beloved Ouija board, its reverse side taped with snippets of dialogue. It’s virtuoso silliness, and her final exorcism, opposite the irreplicable Rachel Dratch as the Condomines’ maid, is among the funniest things I’ve ever seen onstage. Emphasis on ever.

There are a few ghostly effects by Skylar Fox, but Stone and book adapter Bill Rosenfield handle the climactic ones with simple narration, smart in a practical way though slightly underwhelming theatrically. Still, if that’s the biggest flaw, they’ve done remarkably well. High Spirits is a guaranteed cure for the wintertime blues, and it’s as close to heaven as I hope to get this week.