Theater: Houseghost

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High Spirits is better as a showcase than a show. Such improbable sprites as Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes exist in the imagination of no playwright, not even Noel Coward, who wrote Blithe Spirit and directs this musical derived from it.

Bea is an earthbound Nijinsky who can entrechat her way across a stage in half-inch leaps. Footwork is needlework to Bea—she crochets with her toes. If playgoers dare to laugh at her outlandishly comic bits of business, she freezes upon them the look of an embalmed codfish until they burst out laughing all over again. Her costumes are designed by the Mad Hatter, and so is she.

Tammy is a genie out of another bottle. From a mouth carved by a razor she lets slip songs and dialogue as if they were secret vices. Other people speak; Tammy makes animal noises. She looks like a love goddess playfully absent without leave from the moon.

Tammy materializes after a misbegotten seance recalls her from the dead to hex her slightly unnerved husband (Edward Woodward) and badly annoyed second wife (Louise Troy). The zany medium, Madame Arcati (Bea) leaves the trio to make the worst of things and the best of fun out of their unearthly fix.

The light, ghostly touch is somewhat lacking from High Spirits. Act 1 foot-drags until Go into Your Trance sets the stage shivering with dancing spooks and eerily flying chairs and tables. Except for a love ballad, If I Gave You ("prides of lions"), the Hugh Martin-Timothy Gray score is uneventful. Living in trial bigamy, Edward Woodward is as suave as he was simple in last season's Rattle of a Simple Man. But the good-luck charms of High Spirits are Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes, who push the show for laughs more often than it moves of its own free whim.