I just got an invitation by email: "Your presence requested – whatever you're wearing, please come and review, without fail." Putting on my thinking cap, tying up my laptop and brushing up my hopes, I stepped out to the Playhouse where the stage simply reeked with class.
Tom Chambers – as the fancy-free hoofer Jerry Travers – doesn’t attempt to impersonate Fred Astaire, but he does catch the conversational way Astaire phrased Irving Berlin’s lyrics and when he starts to dance it just clicks.
Precise, yet easy-oasy. Elegant, yet playful. No wonder hotel maids, bell-hops and passers-by all fall into step with him, ensuring the ensemble routines in this staging of the 1935 film tap into the fantasy glamour of RKO’s musical hits.
They’re all tremendously swish on the ballroom floor, dancing Cheek to Cheek, full of pzazz, kicking up their heels on the Lido for the Piccolino. With such a feast of musical numbers, who cares if the plot – true love tripped up by mistaken identity gaffes and some rather creaky comedy – is both wafer-thin and over-stretched. Or that Summer Strallen is maybe a pinch short of Ginger as Dale Tremont: she looks the part, sings well and her feet (unlike her accent) are always in the right place.
Hildegard Bechtler’s set puts on the ritz with lots of Deco details, the live band is snazzy when the rhythms are bright and chirpy, and swooningly lush when Berlin’s tunes soar into the dream-time heart of romance. Jerry does get Dale in the end, but we greedily wish there was more trouble ahead, just so they could face more music and keep dancing.
HHHH
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