Irving Berlin’s Top Hat taps into the Edinburgh Playhouse this week with more sparkle than a sequinned gin palace, and, in a rare feat, manages to float for two and a half hours without ever feeling heavy. Not just that, the sound is also extraordinary, and for a venue sometimes dogged by poor acoustics, this is a revelation: sound clear as a bell, band fizzing with verve, and an audience leaning in from overture to curtain.
For context, Top Hat began life in 1935 as an RKO film directed by Mark Sandrich, a vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with Berlin supplying the evergreen numbers, “Cheek to Cheek,” “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?”. The stage version we see tonight descends from the 2011 UK adaptation by Matthew White and Howard Jacques, which expands the film with more Berlin gems and found great success in the West End. The bones remain classic screwball farce: mistaken identities swirling through hotels and an idealised Venice, draped in deco glamour.
The leads offer a curious yin-yang that works far better than one might predict. Phillip Attmore (Jerry) is not the world’s smoothest singer, but he is, by thunder, a dancer of extraordinary precision and joy. Opposite him, Amara Okereke (Dale) sings with a silken confidence that lifts Berlin’s score into the rafters, even if her dancing is more serviceable than spectacular. Somehow, though their strengths and weaknesses dovetail, his footwork fills the spaces where her voice doesn’t, and vice versa, producing a chemistry that feels both balanced and alive.
But it is Comedy that proves the evening’s stealth weapon. More than a dash of a Fawlty Towers vibe crept in: Alex Gibson-Giorgio’s Beddini as a kind of Manuel-with-medals, James Hume’s Horace as a Basil-lite bundle of nerves, and Sally Ann Triplett’s Madge radiating Sybil-esque sangfroid. I half expected a moose head to descend from the flies! Far from tired farce, the humour sparkled, with perfectly timed double-takes and asides that landed just as cleanly as the dance breaks.
The set also deserves its own ovation. Peter McKintosh presents the action in a gold lustred proscenium framing an arch within an arch, a sort of Russian doll of Art Deco geometry. The outer arch, LED-rimmed and railway-shed grand, glowing in shifting colours, deep blue to pulsating red, drawing the eye deeper to the inner arch which rotates to provide perfectly intimate scenes, a bar, a bedroom, a hotel lobby. It’s architecture as stagecraft: vast yet precise, sweeping yet capable of focus. In the second half especially, the glowing arches pulled us closer, bathing the action in shades that shifted from champagne fizz to midnight blue. As an architect, I can only applaud the design, this has to be one of the cleverest, most beautiful uses of the Playhouse stage I’ve seen.
Lighting and costume doubled down on the glamour: gowns that whispered audibly, tails that gleamed under a crisp white glow, and a palette that kept Deco lines clean without ever lapsing into pastiche. The band, stationed at the apron, played with sheer joy, brass purring, strings swooning, percussion punctuating like Champagne corks.
What impressed most was the weightlessness. Too often, these glossy period pieces drag their feet after interval. Not here. Marshall’s staging kept things on its toes, the rhythm propulsive, the humour surprising, the visuals ever shifting. At two and a half hours it should have sagged; instead, it sailed.
By the finale, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” sweeping across a stage now incandescent with light, the Playhouse felt almost airborne. This was, frankly, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in this theatre. Berlin’s champagne bubbles never went flat, and the company served them up with wit, style and buckets of tap. Edinburgh: you’ve been spoiled.
Playing until 4th October, https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/top-hat/edinburgh-playhouse/
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 30th September 2025
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 2hr 30mins (including interval)
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