The upcoming Broadway revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit will go on general sale on Saturday, December 20, 2008. Tickets can be purchased by visiting telecharge.com or calling 212-239-6200 in the New York area, and 800-432-7250 outside the New York metro area.
Rehearsals are scheduled to begin Monday, January 26, 2009 with the first performance on Thursday, February 26, 2009 and the official opening on Sunday, March 15, 2009 at The Shubert Theatre (225 West 44th Street).
Blithe Spirit will star Four time Tony Award-winner Angela Lansbury (Sweeney Todd,Gypsy, Dear World, Mame), Rupert Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding, An Ideal Husband), Two time Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole (Grey Gardens, 42nd Street), and Two time Tony nominee Jayne Atkinson ("24", "Recount" Enchanted April) Simon Jones (Waiting in the Wings, The Real Thing) and Deborah Rush (Noises Off!) round out the cast. The play will be directed by two-time Tony Award winner Michael Blakemore (Kiss Me, Kate, Copenhagen).
Blithe Spirit, one of Noel Coward's most popular comedies, was first seen on Broadway, in 1941, the same year it was produced in London where it set British box office records and was the longest running comedy (1997 performances) until it was eventually surpassed by Boeing-Boeing in the 1970's. The original Broadway production played nearly two years and co-starred Leonora Corbett, Mildred Natwick, Clifton Webb and Peggy Wood. It was last seen on Broadway in an all-star production in 1987 with Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner, Judith Ivey, and Geraldine Page, in her final Broadway appearance. Coward, in his autobiography, claimed he wrote the play in five days during a holiday. Only two lines of dialogue were removed before its first production in London.Stage and screen star Simon Jones (Waiting in the Wings, The Real Thing), best known to audiences around the world for playing 'Arthur Dent' in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, will return to the New York stage in the role of "Dr. Bradman" in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit.
BIOS
Angela Lansbury, who last appeared on Broadway in Deuce, has enjoyed a career without precedent. Her professional career spans more than a half-century, during which she has flourished, first as a star of motion pictures, then as a four-time Tony Award-winning Broadway musical star and most recently as the star of "Murder, She Wrote," the longest-running detective drama series in the history of television. The actress made her Broadway debut in 1957 when she starred as Bert Lahr's wife in the French farce, Hotel Paradiso. In 1960, she returned to Broadway as Joan Plowright's mother in the season's most acclaimed drama, A Taste of Honey, by Shelagh Delaney. One year later, she starred on Broadway in her first musical, Anyone Can Whistle. Lansbury returned to New York in triumph in 1966 as Mame, for which she won the first of her unprecedented four Tony Awards as Best Actress in a Musical. She received the others as the Madwoman of Chaillot in Dear World (1968), as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy and as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd (1979). From 1984-1996 she starred as Jessica Fletcher, mystery-writing amateur sleuth, on "Murder, She Wrote," for which she won four Golden Globe Awards. In 1982, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1994 she was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Angela and her husband Peter were married in 1949. They worked together until Peter's death in January 2003. Angela has three grown children, Deirdre, Anthony and David, and three grandchildren.
