Top Hat in NJ, May-June 2025

[scenicdesign71]

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This summer I'll be returning to Surflight Theatre for the first time in fifteen years (!) to design the North American premiere of Top Hat – the 2011 West End adaptation of the 1935 Astaire/Rogers RKO movie musical, with its Irving Berlin score augmented by half a dozen additional songs from the Berlin catalog.  The movie is a masterpiece of its kind — which is presumably why, apart from those song additions, the adaptors seem hardly to have altered its screenplay (and only to maintain its flow onstage).

This, in turn, results in what Wikipedia lists as a 2hr 45min runtime (including interval).  By today's standards, that might seem excessive for such gossamer material; but if we really nail it, a pleasingly old-fashioned sense of period indulgence might not come amiss: as in 1935, the real world's dire enough today that audiences looking for escape might be just as happy to spend three hours as two in Berlin's feather-light nostalgic swoon, assuming we can keep its spell from flagging (while stage comedies of the time often ran 2½ hours or more, the original film clocks in at a fleet 1hr 40min).

And it's easy to see why the adaptors chose to stick close to the screenplay.  Wikipedia calls the movie a "screwball musical comedy", but there's very little physical comedy, and the verbal humor is light and dry.  Three-quarters of the story takes place in hotel rooms, though the gorgeous array of Art Deco furniture rarely gets used.  I'm very much looking at all this as a set designer at the moment, trying to figure out how little we can get away with onstage, with 29 (!!) scenes (and scene changes, where furniture is a killer) to get through without adding another hour to the runtime.  Plus, of course, there has to be room to dance — although, thankfully if curiously for what might be thought of as a dance show, there are really only three big ensemble dances, plus a few Fred-and-Ginger pas de deux.

Building a new model box, I'm recalling just what a deviously challenging space this is: impossibly shallow, with limited height in the wings (nothing taller than eight feet can be stored there) and a fly system that has its own quirks.  The audience sightlines are so wide that it's flatly impossible to mask the view into the wings without blocking physical access for actors and scenery (and angles for sidelighting, which are especially crucial in a dance show) — access which is already severely limited by the sheer upstage-downstage shallowness of the space.  Front projection can work, but comes with another set of challenges.

Wish me luck...

[DiveMilw]

How exciting!  I hope I can travel east to see it.  

[scenicdesign71]

"The Thackeray Club" is a fictional London gentlemen's club visited by Astaire in the film's opening moments, solely for a gag in which he disturbs the gentlemen's precious silence with a brief but explosive volley of tap-shoed exuberance.

The scene is just as brief and silly in the stage version (lifted nearly verbatim from the screenplay).  So when my director said she could stage it with just three wing chairs, I was thrilled not to have to wrangle a dozen of them, or any other scenery, for just one throwaway moment whose sole purpose is to establish "Jerry's" (the Astaire character, though I often find myself referring to him as Fred) mischievous, devil-may-care insouciance.

But I had done a little research on London men's clubs of the '30s, and on London at that time more generally, and was still approaching this particular scene in too dully realistic a manner, figuring that if Jerry/Fred was occupying one chair, that would leave only two for other gents to tsk-tsk at the rustling of his newspaper.  Surely there would have to be others standing around — the dynamic of the scene, with the fish-out-of-water American outnumbered by stone-faced Brits, would appear to depend on numbers.  I added standing figures, a side table, a couple of lamps — anything to establish the stuffiness of the place and give Jerry something to work against.

It was looking so awful, so "this wants to be an extravagant Hollywood set, but we could only afford three chairs and two lamps" — so sad and defeated and cringey — that I finally deleted everything and started over, thinking there must be a way to make smallness somehow work for the scene instead of against it.  For starters, what if there we really do see only two club members, plus Jerry?

I thought of the three monkeys, seeing/hearing/speaking no evil — an image used by the director of the first Forum I designed (28 years ago!) as part of a three-part gag during the second-act chase scene in which Pseudolus escapes from Miles Gloriosus's soldiers.

And everything popped into place.  This club isn't a real location, it's a pretext for a joke.  And jokes work especially well with threes:  one (person, object, event) establishes a context, the next leads us in one direction, the third upends our expectations.  In schematic terms, it only takes two other club members to make Jerry the odd man out, and the theatre-game simplicity of establishing their relationship in so simple and spare a manner could be part of the fun.  Hence: three identical wing chairs, arranged in rigid symmetry with three identical ashtrays next to them and three identical lamps hanging above them.  Three apparently-identical men in suits hidden behind three identical newspapers — until Jerry peeks out from behind his, and we know immediately that this microcosm of staid conformity can't last long.  There's a elegant simplicity to this setup that I'm actually really proud of, even if it did take me far too long to find: yes, sure, class and social dynamics and Anglo/American stereotypes and Jerry's/Fred's knack for bringing an impish joie de vivre to rarefied social spaces, all that stuff I was getting bogged down in — it is all relevant, but for any of it to emerge (and more importantly, for the joke to land) requires the quick, confident strokes of a cartoon.

My initial impulse was to have all three wing chairs facing front, and I might still return to that.  But turning them slightly toward center seemed useful — along with spacing them apart just widely enough to feel awkward, as though the chairs were intended (but failed comically) to form a companionable grouping.  It gives the cartoon a tiny toehold in the real world.

The scene itself actually unfolds in three stages, which this rendering compresses into a single image.  First, lights up on the three chairs, their occupants buried in their newspapers: silence... silence... until Jerry clears his throat, to general disapproval.  Second, Jerry's producer Horace enters from the street and brags to the concierge (shown at stage-right), about his upcoming West End hit.  Third, Horace finds Jerry and whispers to him to come back to the hotel where they can talk.  On his way out, Jerry lets loose with a few seconds of tapping, shattering the silence and scandalizing the Thackerayites (...both of them — and the concierge too, presumably).

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The "Silence" sign, upstage, is specified in a stage direction.  The shushing faces projected at the outer corners of the proscenium are my own invention; having established those spots for specific projections at other points in the show, I'm now finding things to project there in almost every scene.  The Thackeray Club sign is also projected.  The London skyline upstage is introduced here and remains for the rest of the first act (replaced by a Venetian skyline when we go there in Act 2).  And the geometric pewter-and-bronze-colored Art Deco surround stays throughout; having long since decided to let minimal scenic elements (furniture, doors, etc.) float against an abstract background, it's ironic that it took me so long to figure out the Club: turns out, the "real" stuff doesn't want to be all that much real-er than the Deco fantasy framing it.

And even this may be too much, in pure practical terms: finding and/or reupholstering three nice wing chairs to match will be a chore, as will jigsawing the three hanging-lamp cutouts and either electrifying them or creating a projection to make them appear illuminated.  Painting and rigging them along with the narrow strip of "ceiling" from which they hang will take time and money.  For a two-minute joke, it may not be justifiable.  But I assume the adaptors included this scene partly to reassure audiences familiar with the film that they wouldn't be tampering with it; and while it's preceded onstage by an opening number ("Puttin' On The Ritz") from Jerry's show, and one quick stage-door scene to whisk him from B'way to London, the Thackeray Club is still close enough to the top of the show that an argument can be made for treating it carefully: as the very first scene, about ten minutes into the stage version, that viewers will recognize from the film (where it's the first scene, period), it feels kind of important not to half-ass it.