Spiral Notebook: Thou shalt fill the coffers

The Book Of Mormon is doing great business at the Prince of Wales theatre.

Now impresarios are revisiting their back catalogued to see if they can reboot old favourites with a satirically religious theme to fill their coffers anew.

Mary Poppins: An enigmatic maiden sweeps into town without a place to stay. She finds lodgings and quickly founds a child-centred cult that ritually distributes magical liquids to adherents that are not what they seem. Features the hit song Like A Virgin.

Top Hat: The centrepiece of this Amish gaslight review, dubbed the unplugged musical, is the barn-raising scene assembled to the haunting acoustic melodies of If I Had A Hammer and Electric Dreams.

Oliver! A panto favourite in which the Royalists only have two weeks to save Christmas before republic pretender Cromwell cancels the festivities. Features the pop ditty Charles Just Wanna Have Fun.

Annie Get Your Gun: In the Deep South of America, fundamentalist Christians in bunkers sense a gang of East Coast liberals under orders from President Obama are prowling the hilltops looking to impose Sharia Law.

Starlight Express: John Travolta and Tom Cruise in a sci-if fantasy on roller skates in which a bunch of crazy alien invasion stories gain traction and money. Features If I Were A Rich Man and Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

A Chorus Line: Heart-rending coming of age drama in which a troop of auditioning choirboys troop up the spire to hear the verdict of a tough-as-nails priest. Features the songs Boy For Sale and Fiddler On The Roof.

Sunday In The Park With George: Stephen Sondheim's cultured classic is re-imagined with former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey hiding in the bushes in Hyde Park spouting anti-Coalition rhetoric. Features Feed The Birds.

Greece: The tale of Achaicus, a Corinthian Christian, one of the Seventy Disciples, who according to the Bible, together with Fortunatus and Stephanas, carried a letter from the Corinthians to St Paul, and from St Paul to the Corinthians before joining the T-Birds and Pink Ladies at the Rydell High school dance.

Seventy Brides For Seventy Brothers: Tears, tiaras and tantrums as the Rev Sun Myung Moon prepares his Unification Church for another mass wedding.

Seven Brides For One Brother: Chaos and confusion at the Church of the Latter Day Saints as groom David forgets who's who in his polygamous nuptials with hilarious consequences. Features the song You're The Ones That I Want.

Seven Brides For Seven Brides: Controversial off-West End study of a mass lesbian wedding that became a spark for riots with the Church Of England. Features a reworking of the hit song Nothing Like A Dame.

Saturday Night Fever: Ferris Bueller fakes illness to avoid Matins.

Stage review: Top Hat, Aldwych

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