Top Hat, at Aldwych Theatre, Seven magazine review The whole thing could well have fallen flat on its face. It delights me to say, therefore, that Matthew White, the director, has somehow managed to pull it off. If there has ever been a more sublimely performed, choreographed, orchestrated and costumed musical in the past 25 years, then I certainly haven't seen it. Naturally, the first thing to focus on are the top hats. They are real silk hats, which don't come cheap. The silk, however, gives them a uniquely lustrous sheen that evokes Hollywood's golden age. The attention to detail is obsessive. The female chorus's costuming doesn't just look like Schiaparelli couture: it shouts Schiaparelli. The Lido in Venice and the grand hotels of New York and London - not to mention an aeroplane making its way over Europe - have also all been lovingly recreated by the designer Hildegard Bechtler. It helps, too, of course that Tom Chambers and Summer Strallen, as the sassy wisecracking pair who fall in love, can both dance and sing like a dream. The plot - of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, but girl gets him mixed up with another boy - is little more than a linking device for Irving Berlin's big numbers, yet it's still great fun and exquisitely written. Chambers is as light on his feet as Astaire, but he has a bit more testosterone about him, which gives his romance with Strallen's ditzy blonde real oomph. Strallen is simply sensational as the object of his affections. All too few modern actresses can manage the looks, the voices and the deportment of women from the Roaring Twenties, but Strallen, magnificently, achieves the hat trick. There are entertaining comedy turns, too, from Martin Ball and Vivien Parry, as a bickering couple, and Stephen Boswell as their wonderfully lugubrious butler. For all its good looks and panache, it is finally Berlin's ageless music and lyrics that entrances the most. Puttin" on the Ritz, Let's Face the Music and Dance and, of course, Top Hat, White Tie and Tails all inevitably had the audience in heaven. As much as we might all have been ground down by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim in recent years, standards like these remind us of a time when musicals could stake legitimate claims to greatness. Sacrilege it may be, but I actually think this Top Hat is even more impressive than the film, not least because it's all in glorious Technicolor. A musical like this comes around once in a lifetime. Aldwych Theatre, to Jan 26, www.tophatonstage.com