Top Hat, Chichester Festival Theatre review - top spectacle but book tails off

After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive nature of really strong books in stage musicals, not quite as straightforward as meets the eye.

More of that later and, let’s be honest here, nobody is relaxing back into some of the country’s most comfy theatre seats expecting to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, are they?

No they’re not. Older punters – and there are a few at Chichester, especially at a matinée – will recall Fred and Ginger on the silver screen, spied through plumes of cigarette smoke, he as weightlessly elegant as ever, she much the same, but backwards and in heels. Younger punters will have grown up on Strictly, so they’ll love the dresses, the set piece dances (many cheek-to-cheek, natch) and tunes that you kinda know and always have. Us inbetweeners will recall the aged, but still dapper, Fred, eyes twinkling, charm going to 11, on chat shows when they rolled the old tapes, and he’d smile. And we’ve all seen that YouTube clip of Uptown Funk!

So if the stage adaptation of the 1935 film was a hit in 2011, it sure ain’t going to flop in 2025, especially given a healthy dose of the Chichester Festival Theatre Annual Summer Musical razzle-dazzle treatment. Peter McKintosh’s set is an art deco delight (they really should sell some of those props as merch) and he’s also wowing us with Yvonne Milnes, delivering a dizzying array of fabulous 1930s costumes for the principals, the cameos and the ensemble, dancing girls and all. Want to know where your box office buck has gone? “Don’t believe me, just watch!”   Underpinning all this spectacle are some of Irving Berlin’s greatest songs, all simple chord progressions, simple lyrics and anything but simple genius. The overture is just hook after hook after hook, and then they come in their full glory. “Puttin on the Ritz” as a big showstopping opener (if that’s not a contradiction); “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”. They each have their own page in The Great American Songbook.

With some additions to the film’s score, there are 15 numbers and reprises, every one great to listen to, with Stephen Ridley’s orchestra giving full value without overpowering the voices. Getting them all in, and you wouldn’t want to cut any of them because they’re Berlin first and director/choreographer, Kathleen Marshall, does a great job with all of them second, but that does push the runtime beyond two and a half hours. So the cast, with varying degrees of success, are obliged to keep the plot's plates spinning. It’s no easy task.

Phillip Attmore brings Broadway leading man energy to Sussex with the full triple threat of dancing, singing and comedy as Lothario Jerry Travers. He’s matched (more than matched on vocals) by Lucy St Louis as the misapprehending girl of his dreams, Dale Tremont. Her “Better Luck Next Time” number can convince you it’s 11 o’clock, even if it's actually 5 o’clock.

But it’s nigh on impossible to believe that a bright kid like her would labour under a misunderstanding for quite so long, nor in the writers (Matthew White and Howard Jacques on adaptating duty) layering on the circumlocutions required to keep her in a state of ignorance. You can make allowances for MT – it's not Chekhov we're talking about – but only so many.

Clive Carter and Sally Ann Triplett enjoy contrasting treatment at the hands of the plodding book. His Horace Hardwick is a bumbling buffoon with a terrible line in jokes, but her Madge Hardwick, his battleaxe wife, fares much better, her one-liners successfully picking up the show after an over-extended first half. 

Alex Gibson-Giorgio does what he can with a borderline offensive stereotype Italian dress designer – less said, the better. But James Clyde is in showstealing form as Hardwick’s gentleman’s gentleman, the morose demeanour thawing to a tremendous comic turn in a range of outrageous disguises. He can have Lady Bracknell whenever he wants it!

And, after an absurdly swift and neat tying up of loose ends, the hard-working chorus is back to hoof it some more and bow, and we’re done.

Not quite top hole, but Top Hat is topping fun if you take it on its own terms. To be fair, that’s pretty much always the deal from RKO to MGM to Universal (Wicked) today. And why ever would you not?   

• Top Hat at Chichester Festival Theatre until 6 September
• More theatre reviews at theartsdesk