STAGE
Top Hat
Aldwych Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Sumptuous settings and silky dancing ensure Irving Berlin's classics are serenaded in style.
REVIEW
There's so much corn at the Aldwych a small heatwave could start a tasty explosion, or a cinema concession.
Sweet or salted? Sweet, of course, as this effortlessly classy musical turns a slight boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl hiccup into two-and-a-half hours of delightful hoofing, non-stop action and money-on-show costumes.
Here's the plot precis: "Jerry Travers (Tom Chambers), the famous American tap dancer, arrives in London to appear in his first West End show. Travers meets the irresistible Dale Tremont (Summer Strallen), the girl of his dreams, and follows her across Europe in an attempt to win her heart."
That makes it sound like complex psycho-drama compared to the slender reality. But that's not the point. The point is the succession of sumptuous Irving Berlin numbers (Puttin' On The Ritz, Top Hat, Lets Face The Music), the clackety-clack chorus line, the screwball romance and the top hat and tails.
The whole lot is played as farce ably assisted by the 'Allo 'Allo Italian manglings of Ricardo Afonso's dress designer Alberto Beddini and the hen-pecked shenanighans of Martin Ball's impresario Horace Hardwick - not forgetting the hen herself, Vivien Parry.
To emphasise the sheer silliness of the story, the script is a succession of groaners. To wit:
"What's this power you have over horses?"
"Horse power?"
Strictly winner Tom Chambers plays Fred Astaire playing Jerry Travers and Summer Strallen plays Ginger Rogers playing Dale Tremont without entirely recapturing the chemistry of the 1935 RKO classic.
The former is ostentatious and charming, the latter, feisty and game and between them manage to convince that a small case of mistaken identity is worth the fuss that ensues.
In fact, by the close, you would only cheer more if it were Bradley Wiggins and Jessica Ennis who had donned the taps and were dancing Cheek To Cheek.
Now booking to 2013. Go to aldwych.official-theatre.co.uk
© Images: Brinkhoff and Mogenburg
