Though stylishly mounted with lavish tap and ballroom routines to Irving Berlin’s peerless songs, this adaptation of the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film is a curiously flat affair. As long as director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall’s cast are singing and dancing it’s fine, and the orchestra’s renditions of Puttin’ on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek and Let’s Face the Music and Dance are blissful high points in a score crowded with hits. But the slight and overextended romance that fills the gaps in between is sluggish where it should sparkle, the pace slow. The celebration of a gilded interwar age feels forced.
As Jerry Travers, a star Broadway hoofer transplanted to open a revue in London, Philip Attmore displays dazzling tap moves but only a gossamer layer of charm. As Dale Tremont, the fashion model Jerry pursues through absurd instances of mistaken identity, Amara Okereke has a lovely voice but seems a less fluid dancer than in previous roles. There’s little heat between them, little zing to the comic interplay among them and co-stars Clive Carter and Sally Ann Triplett.
It’s weird: Marshall is a triple Tony-winning Broadway veteran who helmed the sublime revival of Anything Goes at the Barbican in 2021, a triumph that announced London theatre was back, back, back, post-pandemic. When Matthew White and Howard Jacques first adapted Top Hat for the stage in 2011 – adding in some additional songs from Berlin’s back catalogue - it ended up winning the Best Night Out prize, voted for by readers, at the Evening Standard Awards.
This production got enthusiastic reviews when it opened earlier this year at Chichester Festival Theatre, which is normally a reliable feeder for the London musical scene. Yet at times the energy was so low in the early matinee I saw, I wondered if the cast had walked all the way from there to the South Bank. As I say, it’s fine, just not quite the champagne cocktail it could be.
The plot need not detain us long. Jerry’s compulsive tap dancing in his swanky London hotel disturbs Dale’s beauty sleep the day before she’s due in Venice to showcase the creations of designer Alberto Beddini (Alex Gibson-Giorgio). Smitten, Jerry pursues her to her riding lesson in Hyde Park and woos her during a thunderstorm to the strains of Isn’t It a Lovely Day – another deliciously breezy Berlin number.
But for reasons that stretch credulity, Dale mistakes Jerry for his producer Horace (Carter), who is married to her much-divorced old friend Madge (Triplett), who is already in Venice. There follows a contrived set of will-they-won’t-they shenanigans built around a jet-set dash to Italy. The zingy ardour between Jerry and Dale should stand in contrast to the already-wearied cynicism of Horace and Madge, but of the four, only Tripplet puts any oomph into her one-liners. James Clyde has moderate fun with the po-faced role of Horace’s butler, Bates, but the comedy honours are stolen by Gibson-Giorgio’s outrageously accented and mustachioed Beddini.
The set and costumes by Peter McKintosh are at least fabulous. The centrepiece is a giant Art Deco half-clockface on which the skylines of London and then Venice are imposed. Built into it is a smaller semicircular revolve, which serves up gorgeous vignettes from a stuffy gentleman’s club to a ritzy hotel bar. Alongside the white tie and tails outfits of the opening number McKintosh conjures up plumed showgirl costumes and a range of natty pastel riviera looks, a beautifully cut sky-blue suit for Attmore and a floating, fringed silver number for Okereke.
Marshall’s production will doubtless find an audience among those who grew up watching classic 1930s films on terrestrial telly or who hunted them out on DVD or at repertory screenings. But the atomization of entertainment means that long tail of cultural heritage can no longer be relied upon to sustain stage adaptations. If any of the TikTok generation stray into this flat Top Hat – and there weren’t any visible in the audience I was part of – I suspect they’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
Queen Elizabeth Hall, to Jan 17; southbankcentre.co.uk
