HIGH SPIRITS
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The audiences that saw it loved it–but not that many saw it. When it came to musical comedy, 1963-64 was also the season for big, brassy, high-stepping, all-American shows. Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, and Janis Paige in Here’s Love were the big winners, swamping quirkier attractions such as Angela Lansbury in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, Inga Swenson in Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s 110 in the Shade, and Florence Henderson in Noel Coward’s The Girl Who Came to Supper as well as Lillie.
Thus it’s taken 36 years for High Spirits to make its way to a Chicago stage–according, at least, to the folks at Highland Park’s Apple Tree Theatre, who claim their production is the show’s Chicago-area premiere. I have no reason to doubt them; and I am one particularly inclined to support the retrieval of unusual, neglected items from the storage bins of show business. Still, the main achievement of Seith Reines’s staging of this musical by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray is that it demonstrates that there can be good reasons for neglect.
David Nisbet, who was too shallow in the role of Bill Cracker in Court Theatre’s Happy End last season, is quite at home as Charles, the debonair, faintly world-weary leading man familiar from so many Coward plays. His duet with Santen, “Forever and a Day,” is far more touching than the undistinguished song has a right to be. Margo Buchanan, a fine performer too long absent from local stages, is somewhat ill at ease as Ruth, Charles’s practical, slightly domineering wife. The upper-crust attitude she essays in the first scenes don’t at all suit this actress whose best quality is her forthrightness; she’s much stronger once Elvira enters the scene and gives her an antagonist to work off.
