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Dame Angela Lansbury opens to rave reviews in London 'Blithe Spirit'

Posted by:	DistantDrumming 04:11 am EDT 03/19/14

Don't worry, Jesse, I'm not trying to take over for you. However, in light of Dame Angela Lansbury's return to the London stage for the first time in 40 years, I thought it would be nice to check in with the reviews for the production, which opened this week. Well, perhaps to no one's surprise, Dame Angela has earned raves. Every review I've seen has also just about every element of the entire production as well. Here's to you, Dame Angela! I can't wait for your next role in New York! From the Daily Telegraph Thirty five years ago I remember being bowled over by Lansbury’s performance as Mrs Lovett in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd on Broadway. She brings a similar energy and high definition wit to Madame Arcati. Her voice swoops and soars with superb grandeur and her extraordinary dance routine, in which she seems physically to vibrate as she goes into a trance is a wonder to behold. Imagine a cross between Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and a front-cloth scene for Widow Twankey and you will get some impression of the delights of Dame Angela’s performance. She is terrific, too, at the sharp put-downs she delivers when she feels that her hosts aren’t taking her psychic gifts as seriously as they should, and though palpably bonkers, Lansbury’s brisk, gin-guzzling medium is clearly nobody’s fool. This is a tour de force that will glow warmly in the memory of all who see it. From The Independent With her red Princess Leia-style coiffure and clashing arty-meets-hearty wardrobe, Lansbury's Madame A is a quivering, deliciously erratic blend of bohemian lady novelist and girl guide as she knocks back the dry martinis and jauntily urges that “[we] really put our shoulders to the wheel” at the next séance. It's the way, though, that she emphasises the medium's batty and strangely admirable self-belief that makes her portrayal so funny and endearing. Hence the hilariously total solemnity with which performs a stiff-kneed, lunatic getting-into-a-trance dance (with apologies to the Rite of Spring) and the long glare that could shrivel a scorpion with which she counters any hint of levity from the doctor's wife. “'Amateur' is a word I cannot tolerate,” she declares with a fastidious shudder, her sense of the dignity of her calling never remotely dented by the evidence of its unruly results. From The Daily Mail: That makes her 88, not so rare an age these days but still unusual for someone taking a leading role in an expensive West End show. So how is she as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit? Does she convince as this dotty old cabbage? Of course. She is perfect. Makes it look effortless. Let us hail, too, her poise and her gift for gooning. A comic walk she does during the seance has touches of the late Max Wall. This Mme Arcati is tough enough to silence the doctor’s chatty wife with a withering stare; she also takes a girlish delight when she meets a ghost. Even without Dame Angela, and despite the steep ticket prices, this would be a top-class show. With her, it is a West End event. From The Daily Express: Angela Lansbury is 'gob-smackingly brilliant' in Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre. She gives a formidable performance as the bonkers medium Madam Arcati in a fresh, mischieveous new production of Noel Coward's farce Blithe Spirit. Playing the bonkers old medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s farce about a writer who accidentally conjures up the spirit of his first wife while researching a novel, she gets a show-stopping round of applause on her first entrance, which is all part of the celebrity excitement. But the applause she gets on her first exit is because she is gob-smackingly brilliant – an 88-year-old force of nature. It’s a magnetic turn, her indomitable prattle supplemented by an impeccably timed battery of comic sniffs, blinks and withering stares. Her extreme age makes her vitality all the more remarkable. Her trance-inducing dance to the Irving Berlin song Always, in which Josephine Baker seems to meet Eric Morecambe, ranks high in my top 10 theatrical moments ever. From The Arts Desk: Meanwhile, Lansbury is on flamboyant fine form, bypassing the celebrity-idolising applause that greets her every entrance and exit. Reprising her 2009 Tony Award-winning performance, Lansbury eagerly chatters and snuffs for ectoplasm like a reincarnation of Richard Briers crossed with a Pekinese. Then she launches into a mystical, cod-Egyptian dance, resembling a tiptoeing burglar attacked by wasps. Batty fun. From West End Wingers: She doesn’t overdo things as in our last Blithe Spirit and has some nice comic touches. We particularly appreciated her getting-into-trance dance, her passion for cucumber sandwiches and throughout displays remarkable presence, grace and energy. If only we’d actually seen her trying to cycle in her bohemian outfits. From West End Frame: Lansbury gives the most incredible performance and certainly does not hold back one tiny bit. She entered and exited the stage to lengthy, warm rounds of applause throughout and, of course, brought the entire audience to their feet as she took her bow. You certainly feel as if you are in the presence of a legend, and Lansbury certainly reminds us why she is worthy of this status. The Guardian's is the only mixed review I've seen. It's hardly a negative review, but rather the critic finds the marketing and attention being focused on Lansbury, disproportionate to her contribution.: Good as it is to see Angela Lansbury back on a London stage after nearly 40 years, her presence has a faintly distorting effect on an otherwise fine revival of Noël Coward's "improbable farce". It is Lansbury's image that dominates the posters and publicity, but Coward's 1941 play is not called Madame Arcati, nor is it about spiritualism. It is really about a subject that haunts all Coward's best comedies, which is the perils of long-term commitment. But it is Lansbury the audience has come to see and she gives good value. She follows a basic rule of acting by playing Madame Arcati from the character's point of view: not as a fake medium but as someone who takes her trade seriously. Tall, accosting and with hair coiled round her ears like outsize headphones, Lansbury shoots blood-freezing glances at a sceptical doctor's wife. When going into a trance, Lansbury careers around the stage like a bird about to take wing. And she emits little gurgles of delight when the ghostly Elvira blows draughts of air into her face. Even if Lansbury's voice seems on a different level from that of her colleagues, it is a perfectly credible performance. The real star of the show, however, is Charles Edwards as the novelist-hero.

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re: Dame Angela Lansbury opens to rave reviews in London 'Blithe Spirit'

Posted by:	hitbycab 10:29 am EDT 03/19/14
In reply to:	Dame Angela Lansbury opens to rave reviews in London 'Blithe Spirit' - DistantDrumming 04:11 am EDT 03/19/14

This makes me smile!!!

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