Top Hat (Festival Theatre, Chichester)
Verdict: Strictly (fun) dancing
There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance… let’s face the music and dance! The lyrics of one of Irving Berlin’s most famous songs pretty much sums up Kathleen Marshall’s effervescent and near faultless production of the musical based on the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ 1935 movie, Top Hat.
Musical trainspotters will already pre-love Marshall’s work, after her stunning 2021 production of Anything Goes which welcomed us out of lockdown. This doesn’t have quite the same panache (lacking the wit of P.G. Wodehouse). And the company tap numbers aren’t quite as tumultuous. But for sheer blissful froth, it sure gave me goosebumps.
Marshall is once again at the top of her game with choreography that’s joyful, whirling, and detailed, her dancers seeming to float on air.
And if you can keep up with the speed of her leading duo’s footwork, top hats off to you: they match Astaire and Rogers, clunk for clunk and click for click.
Toe-tapping: Lucy St. Louis and Phillip Attmore go through their paces in Chichester’s Top Hat, based on the film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and featuring tunes by Irving Berlin
As showman Jerry Travers, Phillip Attmore is exceptionally nifty. The only evidence that his feet touch the ground is that we hear them.
And as the object of the story’s romantic confusion Dale Tremont, Lucy St. Louis doesn’t miss a beat, ensuring that they are indeed both Dancing Cheek To Cheek.
Hitting her stride, St. Louis’s voice brings to mind Nina Simone, or Ella Fitzgerald. And not only does she have sparkling charm, she has a set of sensational outfits designed in the show by a corny Italian fop Alberto Beddini (a very game Alex Gibson-Giorgio) — but in reality by Yvonne Milnes and set designer Peter McKintosh.
This display of swishing silks and feather-trimmed satins deserves a catwalk of its own. St. Louis even has one pink three-piece suit seemingly just for crossing the stage.
Cheek to cheek: Phillip Attmore and Lucy St. Louis in Kathleen Marshall’s enchanting production of Irving Berlin’s Top Hat at Chichester Festival Theatre
Yes we can-can! Broadway director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall brings the same magic she sprinkled on Anything Goes at the Barbican to Chichester’s big summer show
Attmore may be atypically camp for a red-blooded ladies’ man, but he does have a goofy grin and is as quick on his cues as he is in his shoes.
But Clive Carter, as his out-of-shape manager, prone to comic misfortune, is a hoot; alongside Sally Ann Triplett as his spendthrift wife armed with lethal one liners. Their beautifully honed barbs are distilled into a glorious comic hymn to long marriage: Outside Of That, I Love You.
Alongside McKintosh’s elegantly adaptable Art Deco set, backed by a crescent design like a half-moon face of Big Ben, this is an enchanting two hours 40 minutes, driven by some of Berlin’s finest toe tappers. Not least among them, the title number — as potent an earworm as you could wish for; ensuring this delightful show is strictly fun dancing.
Top Hat runs at Chichester Festival Theatre until September 6.
A Role To Die For (Marylebone Theatre, London)
Verdict: Quantum of comedy
EastEnders’ star Tanya Franks has a role to die for — or maybe die another day for — in this highly amusing spoof about the casting of a new James Bond.
Her character, Deborah, is obviously inspired by Barbara Broccoli who, along with her half-brother Michael Wilson, inherited the Bond film production company, Eon, from her father Albert Broccoli.
Waste products hit the fan when Debs discovers that ‘David’, the hot new actor she’s lined up to be the next 007, is actually a sex pest.
Then, just when she think she’s sort out that mess, there’s another awkward hitch involving David’s classy yet clumsy replacement.
All the while, billionaire moneybags ‘Le Croix’ (read Jeff Bezos) is circling, in the hope of buying Deb’s beloved company.
No, Mr Bond, I expect you to fulfil your contract: EastEnders’ Tanya Franks plays a fictional film producer at the end of her tether, in A Role To Die For
The plot of Jordan Waller’s comedy lurches around like it’s hoovered up too much marching powder, but there are some priceless one-liners including one aimed at Deb’s co-producer: ‘You don’t get money for nothing, Malcolm. Even your ex-wives had to marry you.’
Derek Bond’s production, first seen in Cirencester earlier this year, moves at a good lick, but audition recordings of would-be Bonds undermine our suspension of disbelief.
And Cory Shipp’s set design looks like the Headmistress’s office at a second-tier public school…if the Head had a weird crush on 007.
Franks has fun as the flamboyantly cursing Debs, but also nails the businesswoman’s panic-stricken insecurity.
Philip Bretherton lends brilliant Ted Danson comic vibes to Malcolm, while Harry Goodson-Bevan is amusingly overlooked as Deborah’s woke son ‘Q’.
And Obioma Ugoala made me laugh out loud as a giant, last-ditch Bond.
PATRICK MARMION
A Role To Die For runs at the Marylebone Theatre until August 30.
Hamlet (Sutton Hoo, Suffolk)
Verdict: Hamlet is young again
Under a great chestnut tree above the river Deben stalks a 20ft tall ghost, circling the audience on the stands. Its face is the majestic helmet from the royal burial ship at Sutton Hoo (remember that film The Dig?).
In this fast-moving production the giant puppet is the ghost of Hamlet’s father: three half-glimpsed operators bow its steely head towards him, its huge mailed hands reach out as it tells of ‘foul and most unnatural murder’.
It’s a showstopping moment, but director Joanna Carrick of Red Rose Chain keeps more coming: fiery confrontations, or moments of comedy played wonderfully broad but faithful to Shakespeare. The gravediggers, often cut down by more earnest directors, are pure music-hall. Ailis Duff is a wickedly funny Polonius, too; lecturing an eye-rolling Ophelia on morality. Teenage girls giggled happily.
Hoo are you: The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, in Red Rose Chain’s open air production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, is a giant puppet wearing a model of the Sutton Hoo helmet
It’s a play where angry youth confronts both power and private confusions, and it suits this leaping, running, tussling young cast of eight who double (and treble) as characters around the handsomely vigorous, brooding figure of Vincent Moisy as the prince of Denmark.
He speaks the famous lines as if thinking them out fresh, springing on and off the high wooden tower and gateway with particular confidence since, in this small multiskilled company, he personally built most of the set. As, indeed, he and the team did in New York last month, in Carrick’s play The Ungodly; the Witchfinder General (Moisy) and the rest of the crew hammering planks together for Brits on Broadway.
It would be easy for a small outdoor production to treat Hamlet lightly; or stick to easier plays.
Certainly Carrick presents it with enough clarity to enchant a ten-year-old, there for a birthday treat. But the text is respected more than in some grander productions I could mention.
And despite defying fashion to use no amplification, every character makes every word audible in the big space.
A final wild, cartoonish fight makes you gasp: the rest is silence.Until the player-corpses rise and gently harmonize in the leafy dusk. Beautiful.
LIBBY PURVES
Until August 23, redrosechain.com
Extraordinary Women (Jermyn Street Theatre, London)
Verdict: Confusion reigns
Squirrelled away in a basement just off Piccadilly Circus is the idyllic island of Sirene — or that’s the idea.
Alex Maker’s set design does well to make the most of such a small stage (one which must be crossed in the interval to reach the only toilets in the building).
Rather than the staging, it is the convoluted storytelling which drags you away from 1920’s Italy, and back to that basement in Central London.
The musical, based on a 1928 novel by Compton Mackenzie (Monarch Of The Glen, Whisky Galore), follows Aurora (Caroline Sheen), who has followed her lover Rosalba (Amy Ellen Richardson) to this remote Italian island at the end of WWI.
Siren song: (clockwise from left) Jasmine Kerr, Sophie-Louise Dann, Monique Young and Amira Matthews in Extraordinary Women, a musical based on Compton Mackenzie’s 1928 novel
Rosalba has been busy, creating chaos and scaring away the tourists.
Enter a group of sirens, who act as the catalyst for the show’s narrative.
Parthenope (Monique Young) is tasked with cleaning up Rosalba’s mess before the citizens of the island remove her forcibly.
She summons three other sirens (Sophie Louise Dann, Jasmine Kerr and Amira Matthews), and they proceed to form a multinational cast of women…a French diva, a Russian composer, a couple of Americans, and so on. (Jack Butterworth plays all five of the male roles, cycling through as many accents as costumes.)
How do the sirens know about these women they are playing? Do they become them? Or simply control them? Why do the characters keep up the act even when alone? I have no idea. The story becomes tangled, with multiple plot lines and love triangles distracting from the real meat of the show.
As a result, the first half feels frustratingly haphazard. Things improve in the second half, as you begin to get a grip on the confusing premise — and the end (of the show) is in sight.
The highlight for me was the two-man band in the corner providing live music. It’s clear from their well-rounded vocal performances that many of the actors are singers first.
That’s not enough, however, to distract from the thoroughly bewildering plot. And without a strong narrative foundation, Extraordinary Women ends up being, sadly, rather ordinary.
CAMERON LANE
Extraordinary Women is on at the Jermyn Street Theatre until August 10.
