When Spirits Move

A spectral farce set inside a creaking Victorian boarding house where the wallpaper perspires memories, When Spirits Move lets its dead tenants choreograph a ballroom blitz of pratfalls and heartbreak. Hank Mann’s jittery janitor—half-gravedigger, half-romantic—discovers that every slammed door is a séance and every flickering bulb a confession. James T. Kelley’s monocled miser haunts the hallways like a balance-sheet banshee, while Vernon Dent’s corpulent chef keeps ladling ectoplasmic bisque to an audience of empty chairs. Madge Kirby’s flapper-ghost pirouettes across the staircase as though grief were syncopated, and Charley Chase’s bemused lodger tries to pay rent with IOUs written on shrouds. The house itself breathes: floorboards sigh, banisters shudder, attic rafters rehearse a nocturne of rot. Plot dissolves into atmosphere; the real story is how memory stages its own vaudeville—slapstick one moment, threnody the next—until the walls can no longer tell corpse from comedian.