Review: TOP HAT, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Twenty or so dancers parade in front of an oversized Art Deco clock, to the familiar strains of "Puttin’ on the Ritz" from a brass band offstage. In other words, the stage is set for a comfortingly old-fashioned taste of the Golden Age of movie musicals.

This stage adaptation of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers classic Top Hat, which premiered in 2011, has a plot as paper thin as its source material. Popular revue act Jerry, who’s “afflicted” with an urge to punctuate his dialogue with tap dance, travels to London, only to fall for Dale, an ingenue who mistakes him for her friend’s new husband. An improbable comedy of mistaken identities ensues.

If you don’t put all the hijinks under too much scrutiny, this is a fine excuse for lots of glitzy MGM splendour, and to hear Irving Berlin classics from the original film (as well as a few from the much less famous Rogers-Astaire project Follow the Fleet).

An elegant revolving set piece reveals a new exquisite period backdrop for each scene, adding to the cinematic quality of proceedings. Classic duets like "Cheek to Cheek" and "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?" are rendered in soft, intimate lighting, and the effect is dreamy and understated.

Given the flimsy story they’re working with, writers Matthew White and Howard Jacques have structured the book in such a way that the song and dance feels like a natural insertion, and the musical numbers drive the plot rather than the other way around. They do, however, also place the interval slightly too early, and find themselves wrangling one too many plot resolutions in an overstuffed second act.

Phillip Attmore and Amara Okereke as Jerry and Dale both add new dimensions to their film counterparts. Attmore’s lithe tap dance work is a character unto itself, but his vocals are also charming and almost conversational at times. Okereke, meanwhile, is saddled with a female character without much backstory or development, but manages to lend Dale a compelling blend of playfulness and sexual confidence, especially in the comic seduction number "Wild About You".

But it is the cast of comic side characters who really steal the show. Sally Ann Triplett and Clive Carter as Dale’s friend Madge and her cynical husband Horace lend their versatile character voices to a host of zinging one-liners about their love-hate relationship. Elsewhere, James Clyde is dour and long-suffering as Horace’s valet, and Alex Gibson-Giorgio brings brash innuendo (and striptease) to Jerry’s love rival, a camp Italian fashion designer.

Indeed, in the light of all this fine character work, the limitations of director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall’s staging become more obvious. The charisma and charm of the solos and duets is lost in the ensemble numbers (including the titular ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’), partly because they’ve been confined to a raised platform that only covers about half of the stage. This might work in a larger venue, as a kind of tribute to 1930s vaudeville stagings, but in the Queen Elizabeth Hall the numbers feel restrictive and overcrowded.

If it is overcrowded, though, it’s overcrowded with visual maximalism and exuberance. Top Hat was never going to reinvent the wheel, but it’s a refined, refreshed replica of a wheel that was a joy to watch in the first place.

Top Hat plays Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre until 17 January 2026, then tours the UK

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