Fred and Ginger's shoes prove too big to fill in this flat Top Hat

Telegraph

6 days ago

The American director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall won an Olivier award and eternal gratitude for her superb, uplifting staging of Anything Goes at the Barbican across the pandemic-tainted summers of 2021-2022. She turns her attention now to another darling of the Depression era: Top Hat, with a roll-call of classics by Irving Berlin to match those of Cole Porter last time.
It was a triumph on screen for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1935, playing an American star in London and a hotel-guest initially resistant to his tap-dancing charms, albeit the souped-up stage musical version only arrived in 2011.
Alas, while it's a treat to hear those glorious standards, somewhere along the line – whether in the chemistry between the leads (triple Astaire Award-winning American dancer-actor Phillip Attmore and Lucy St Louis, a Briton), or the general handling of the material itself – the anticipated wow-factor has gone missing.
One stumbling-block is that the storyline is thinner than in Anything Goes. There you have a London-bound ocean-liner spilling over with crew, passengers and rom-com intrigue. Top Hat again involves a transatlantic element, wisecracks and a form of assumed identity, but its complications arise from a corny misunderstanding.
Visiting London to perform, Jerry Travers gets carried away tap-dancing while chatting to his producer – Horace Hardwick – and becomes smitten with the hotel guest downstairs, model Dale Tremont, after she complains about the noise. She mistakes him for Horace – who is married – enabling an oddball courtship, rival overtures from a prissy Italian fashion designer and eventual expressions of surprise from Horace's disdainful wife Madge.
It's much ado about nothing, really. You can mark it down as desirable escapism to a more innocent time except that its old-fashioned male-female relations invite more pushback today than even at its first Olivier-winning showing in the West End in 2012.
'Let's just say that a man is incomplete until he's married – after that he's finished,' jokes Clive Carter's hen-pecked Horace, wearily, and there's a lot more where that came from. Sally Ann Triplett as his battle-axe spouse is so scathing that even their droll reconciliatory duet (Outside of That, I Love You) can't quite banish the sour taste.
More pressingly, there's a strangely withheld quality to Attmore and St Louis, stepping into the daunting shoes of Astaire and Rogers. Some of their dance-moves seem like welcome acts of homage – whether it's the hands-in-pockets synchronicity of Isn't This a Lovely Day … or the big supported backbend in Cheek to Cheek.
But though both have lovely voices and a loose-limbed grace, and Attmore is a top-notch tap-machine, there's a lot of surface finesse, not much spark beneath.
For their part, at their finest – achieving nifty rotations and linked-armed hoofing – the ensemble deliver the requisite clickety-clack pleasures of thundering tap-work on a challengingly compact if beautiful art-deco stage. Yet instead of fully raising the roof on its own terms, the show too often it feels like it's merely doffing its hat to its superior silver screen forbear.
Until Sept 6. Tickets: cft.org.uk/events/top-hat