La Troupe presents Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. A live radio show in Spanish with English supertitles
Noel Coward’s comic masterpiece Blithe Spirit opened in London’s West End in 1941, during the Blitz of World War II, a time when Londoners were being driven into air-raid shelters to survive bombing raids of the German Luftwaffe. Coward, one of the wittiest playwrights England had produced since Congreve, knew the greatest gift he could bestow on his beleaguered city was laughter. And in Blithe Spirit, Coward delivered the goods, so successfully that the play ran for nearly 2,000 performances on the West End, became a long-running Broadway hit, and has endured to this day as an audience favorite.
Blithe Spirit tells the story of Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites an eccentric medium, Madame Arcati, to his country home to conduct a séance, hoping to incorporate some of her “tricks of the trade” into his next book. The scheme backfires when Arcati conjures up the ghost of Charles’s first wife, the seductive and temperamental Elvira, whom Charles’s straightlaced and mature second wife, Ruth, can neither see nor hear. Elvira brings chaos to the Condomine household and to Charles’s second marriage.
Blithe Spirit will be presented in Spanish with projected English supertitles, in three performances at the Jewish Cultural & Community Center (JC3), Calle de las Moras 47 (corner of Cinco de Mayo), on Wednesday, February 11, and Thursday, February 12, at 7pm, and on Sunday, February 15, at 2pm. The format is live radio theater – a reading by actors with music and sound effects before an audience, to be recorded for future podcast.
The splendid cast includes six of San Miguel’s finest actors: Marcela Brondo, Rodrigo Demian, Sofía Leal, Jose Luis Mendoza, Ivette Socorro, and Josefina Valentini. Fredric Dannen is the director. Four of the cast members appeared in the recent hit production Macario, also at the JC3, and Brondo and Demian were seen in the sold-out run of Testosterona last August at the Skot Foreman Gallery.
All seats are 250 pesos. Tickets may be purchased online by clicking https://boletocity.com/tc-events/blithe-spirit/ Or you may buy tickets for cash at The Coffee Society, Sollano 78, open every day from 7:30am to 5:30pm.
Blithe Spirit is a production of La Troupe México, a San Miguel-based company founded in 2017, the only dedicated Spanish/English bilingual theater company in Mexico.