On May 14th, I had the privilege of seeing Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit, the revival of the play by Noel Coward that made a big splash on both sides of the pond when it first debuted in 1941. It was an event a long time in the planning - since August of 2007, actually, when I realized that I had let the opportunity to see Ms. Lansbury in Deuce slip through my fingers. I kicked myself hard for that oversight, and vowed that I would not let another such opportunity pass me by. When my friend Sarah (fan fiction writer and author of the "Adventures in the Endless Pursuit of Entertainment" blog) notified me that tickets for Blithe Spirit were officially on sale, I wasted little time in purchasing a quartet of them for a performance in May - a nice time to visit New York City. My husband Bob, good sport that he is, elected to come along with me and even did most of the online research required for picking out a hotel. He selected an excellent one - the Washington-Jefferson on 51st Street, right in the heart of New York’s Theater District. Small rooms (if by "small" you mean "tiny"), but very nice contemporary en suite baths, reasonable rates, and a fabulous Japanese restaurant on site. We arrived on Wednesday, having successfully negotiated the subway from JFK (again, thanks to Bob’s thorough research).
I should note that aside from passing through during travel, I had only been to New York City once before in my life, back in the late eighties. My family had been visiting my aunt and uncle in Westchester County at the time - I think it was for a family reunion, but I’m hazy on the details now. Anyway, one morning we drove into Manhattan: we went to the World Trade Center, took the elevator to the top, took pictures of the city spread out below us beneath a hazy, overcast sky, went down again. Having done this, we drove back out of Manhattan, and that was pretty much it. Coming back now was essentially like visiting for the first time.
After taking it easy Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Bob and I set out to experience as much New York City as we could in essentially two days. Bob had managed to score reservations to the Late Show with David Letterman online, so after a late breakfast of bagels and lox we headed over to the Ed Sullivan Theater at the corner of 53rd and Broadway to pick up our tickets. 53rd Street bears the honorific “Jerry Orbach Way,” after the late actor who was a fixture on Broadway (and later well-known to MSW fans as Jessica’s Boston PI friend Harry McGraw). Mr. Orbach also has a theater named after him, as does the late Helen Hayes. 
Back to the Late Show: tickets are always free - now those comments Dave sometimes makes to the audience - “Yeah, well, how much did you pay for these tickets” - make perfect sense. You stand in a long line to get your tickets inside the theater, then they tell you when to come back and kick you out again. In our case we reported back at 3:30 for the 4:30 taping of the show. After a long pep talk by Late Show underlings they finally let us into the actual auditorium, which was much smaller than I expected it to be, considering that this was the place where the Beatles made their American debut. But the set is a sight to behold - there is no way you can grasp the complexity of it on television. The colors of the lights, the three-dimensional quality of the models of the New York skyline serving as a backdrop ... all of this is far more vivid in person. And Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra - wow. 
But as cool as attending a taping of the Late Show was, that was not the main event of the evening. Blithe Spirit - and Ms. Lansbury’s performance in it - was the pinnacle of the evening. After dinner on 44th Street with Sarah and her friends Noah and Steve, we headed across the street to the Shubert Theater for the 8 o’clock curtain. The tickets I’d managed to land were fantastic - front row mezzanine, right in the center. Best seats in the house. Although two casting agents (acquaintances of Noah’s) that we ran into outside the theater dismissed it as a “big room with a tiny chandelier,” I thought the set was very beautiful and very realistic, right down to the uncannily natural-seeming lighting effects. I’m not sure what I expected – painted flats, I suppose – but the set positively took my breath away.
Sarah, having already seen Blithe Spirit once at the beginning of its run, said that since then the performance had become much more polished as the actors became more comfortable with their roles and started to have fun with them. She was right - all of the characters sparkled. But although I am admittedly biased, I thought that it was Ms. Lansbury’s performance that was particularly stand-out. It was my first chance ever to see her act in person, and the occasion did not disappoint. The New York Times summarized the challenges of playing Madame Arcati best: "She needs to be simultaneously preposterous and entirely serious, and Angela Lansbury in her Tony-nominated performance in the current revival at the Shubert Theater, is a whirlwind of dottiness with a ramrod spine of practicality." 
It is also a very different performance from what fans of MSW would be used to: aside from the fact that both characters prefer bicycling as their primary mode of transportation, there is very little, if anything, in common between Jessica Fletcher and Madame Arcati. Jessica is a grounded, practical character, not at all superstitious. Madame Arcati is the polar opposite, an eccentric with one foot planted firmly in both the physical and spiritual realms. She has been communicating with the dead since her childhood – she notes that her first ectoplasmic manifestation occurred when she was five – and uses a deceased fourteen year old girl with a head cold as her go-between with the spirits on the other side. She is very specific about what she is and what can and cannot do (no fortune-telling!) and at the same time is accepting of the fact that most people she encounters are skeptical of her skills. The rituals she engages in when holding a séance (including awkwardly dancing to music played on the gramophone) seem whimsical to the other characters, but she is entirely in earnest, and they take her lightly at their peril. Mystery writer Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett) discovers this the hard way: he invites Madame Arcati to his house to perform a séance simply to gather first-hand material about mediums upon which to base a character in a novel, but comes away with much more than he bargained for when the séance successfully summons his deceased, flighty first wife Elvira (Christine Ebersole) back from the other side of the Veil.
We didn’t linger after the performance was over; it was raining outside, which Sarah told us made it unlikely that Ms. Lansbury would linger to sign autographs outside the stage door. So Bob and I parted company with Sarah and Noah and headed back to the hotel, in time to see the broadcast of the Late Show we’d attended that afternoon. The camera panned over the audience too quickly for us to pick ourselves out of the crowd.
The next day, Friday, was devoted to seeing the sights. After a brief trip through Times Square - a place of such sensory overload that I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like on New Year’s Eve - Bob and I followed Sarah’s suggested walking tour of Lower Manhattan, starting with a free round trip on the Staten Island ferry for the close pass of Liberty Island. Upon disembarking back at the southernmost tip of Manhattan we walked up Broadway, passing by Bowling Green (oldest park in the city), Trinity Church, the Ground Zero construction site, Wall Street, finally ending up in Little Italy for lunch. We finished up the evening with drinks in an Irish pub and excellent shashimi in the Japanese restaurant back at the Washington-Jefferson.
If Angela opts to do another Broadway production, I will gladly make the trip to see her perform again.
