Blithe Spirit

Outdoor concerts of familiar music are very much with us now, of course, but the medium takes many forms, and few could match the "Summer Serenade" offered by the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra for sheer charm. Music director Lucinda Carver and the Mozarteans made potentially dutiful observances delightful, Friday evening at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. To begin with, there was well-chosen music.

In the pantheon of Hollywood power couples, Laura and Aldous don't spring to mind as readily as Liz and Dick, F. Scott and Zelda or Angelina and Brad. But although their seven-year union was brief, it's tough to imagine a more profound marital connection than the one between Aldous Huxley, the urbane British author of the dystopian novel "Brave New World," and his second wife, Laura Archera, a classically trained musician, lay analyst, bestselling author, avowed humanist, irrepressible eccentric and certifiable life force.

Early in 1941, with WWII casting a dark cloud over Europe, Noel Coward decided his contribution to the war effort would be to write a memorable comedy, direct and star in a powerful film about the British Navy, and write several songs that would last. The film was "In Which We Serve," and Coward's songs from that period have lasted.

Noel Coward once described himself as "an enormously talented man, and there's no use pretending that I'm not." So he may have had an ego as big as the Titanic, but there's no denying Coward was a genius whose brilliance traversed numerous mediums. A true renaissance man, Coward wrote such classic plays as "Hay Fever," "Private Lives," 'Blithe Spirit" and "Design for Living," countless songs including "I'll See You Again" and "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," starred and directed in theater and film and even gave Oscar-winning director David Lean his first opportunity to become a filmmaker.

A supernatural, quicksilver version of Carole Lombard, this is one ghost who can haunt the Greater Los Angeles area all she likes. Audiences will be the happier for it. The ghost--well, technically, the actress playing the ghost--is Kaitlin Hopkins, and at present she is proving herself an excellent Elvira, the "morally untidy" shade of novelist Charles Condomine's first wife, in the Pasadena Playhouse revival of Noel Coward's endlessly revisited "Blithe Spirit." It's not a memorable production.

The characters in Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" do relish a dry martini. Charles Condomine, the novelist-protagonist of the piece, prepares the evening's libations with the intensity of an ancient alchemist. Savoring the result, his second wife, Ruth, gives an ecstatic shudder. "Dry as a bone," she pronounces. That's a thematic manifesto if ever there was one.

Jean Staple ton wanted to know, "Is it GEN-uine or genu-INE?" Her veddy British accent sounded impeccable, but she was taking no chances. Nicholas Hormann, who sounded veddy veddy himself, pulled out his pronunciation dictionary and flaunted it. The second day of rehearsals for South Coast Repertory's "Blithe Spirit" had just begun, and the entire cast was in a bantering mood over the pronunciation of all sorts of Anglicisms. "Is it ZEH-bra or ZEE-bra?"

The enduring popularity of "Blithe Spirit" owes as much to its archly whimsical premise as to the adept way that author Noel Coward dispatches his bon mots. Both are on display in the well-appointed Hermosa Beach Playhouse revival of this indestructible property. Reportedly written in six days during the Blitz, Coward's "improbable farce" has been a crowd-pleaser since its 1941 London premiere, Broadway triumph and David Lean's 1945 film version.

The ghost is not the only thing in "Blithe Spirit" that lacks life at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company's Hahn Cosmopolitan. The actors are willing, but the play, a tired old bag of cliches about a man haunted by his first wife, rattles around on stage like an injured beast begging to be released from its misery. After three hours, the audience, too, knows just how it feels.

Geraldine Page dominated the Broadway stage once more on Wednesday, as a standing-room-only audience of family and friends, co-workers and fans filled the Neil Simon Theater to bid farewell to the actress, who died last Saturday at 62. Actor Rip Torn, Page's husband of 30 years, stepped center stage at the start of the two-hour memorial service and gazed at the several thousand people who filled the theater's seats and aisles. "Yeah, Gerry would like this," he said.

There is something stubbornly old-fashioned about the Tony Awards, the 63rd edition of which was broadcast Sunday night over CBS. As a television broadcast -- a real-time event honoring a craft that exists in real time -- it's a yearly revival, "Brigadoon"-like, of a type of singing-dancing variety TV whose light otherwise went out sometime in the 1970s. (And as a theatrical event -- a one-night-only performance on the stage of Radio City Music Hall -- it is just a night off for many of the honored productions.

The enduring popularity of "Blithe Spirit" owes as much to its archly whimsical premise as to the adept way that author Noel Coward dispatches his bon mots. Both are on display in the well-appointed Hermosa Beach Playhouse revival of this indestructible property. Reportedly written in six days during the Blitz, Coward's "improbable farce" has been a crowd-pleaser since its 1941 London premiere, Broadway triumph and David Lean's 1945 film version.

It's great when your co-writer is a genius, especially when he's dead. In 1948, Cole Porter teamed up with Shakespeare to suss the trouble men and women make when they can't decide whether to throw a kiss or a punch. "Kiss Me Kate," Porter's giddy reworking of "Taming of the Shrew" is now on the boards at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center in Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities' glossy, broad rendition.

The characters in Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" do relish a dry martini. Charles Condomine, the novelist-protagonist of the piece, prepares the evening's libations with the intensity of an ancient alchemist. Savoring the result, his second wife, Ruth, gives an ecstatic shudder. "Dry as a bone," she pronounces. That's a thematic manifesto if ever there was one.

Constance Cummings, an American actress who dazzled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic on stage and in such motion pictures as "Movie Crazy" and "Blithe Spirit," has died. She was 95. Cummings died Wednesday of natural causes in the Chelsea section of London. She had lived there since 1933, when she married British playwright and member of Parliament Benn Wolfe Levy. He died in 1973.

Those unseen Irish hobgoblins of Conor McPherson's "The Weir" would be tornapart, mercilessly, by the creatures inhabiting Caryl Churchill's infinitely meaner play "The Skriker," now at Santa Monica's City Garage. For her title character, a shape-changing spirit preying on vulnerable humans, Churchill (best known in America for "Cloud Nine" and "Top Girls," two high points of late 20th century drama) invents a Joycean stream-of-consciousness language.

The only fan letter George M. Cohan ever wrote was to Noel Coward; he admired Coward's ability to underplay. A contained actor himself, Cohan once directed Spencer Tracy to "act less." If director Lisa Gary had given that admonishment to her cast in Coward's "Blithe Spirit" at the La Habra Depot Theatre, her production might have reached its peak comic level.

ANAHEIM 8pm Pop Music He's nominated for record of the year (his Spanish-language version of "Livin' La Vida Loca") and for best male vocalist in the new Latin Grammy Awards to be handed out Sept. 13. Catch Ricky Martin on his return appearance to Orange County tonight at the Arrowhead Pond. * Ricky Martin, Arrowhead Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 8 p.m. $35 to $95. (714) 704-2500.

A supernatural, quicksilver version of Carole Lombard, this is one ghost who can haunt the Greater Los Angeles area all she likes. Audiences will be the happier for it. The ghost--well, technically, the actress playing the ghost--is Kaitlin Hopkins, and at present she is proving herself an excellent Elvira, the "morally untidy" shade of novelist Charles Condomine's first wife, in the Pasadena Playhouse revival of Noel Coward's endlessly revisited "Blithe Spirit." It's not a memorable production.

Outdoor concerts of familiar music are very much with us now, of course, but the medium takes many forms, and few could match the "Summer Serenade" offered by the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra for sheer charm. Music director Lucinda Carver and the Mozarteans made potentially dutiful observances delightful, Friday evening at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. To begin with, there was well-chosen music.