Top Hat in NJ, May-June 2025

[scenicdesign71]

You cannot view this attachment.

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.