#1
Posted: 12/3/10 at 3:16am
Summer's stepping out in stage version of Top Hat
Summer Strallen is ready to breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class by puttin’ on her Top Hat.
The actress and Tom Chambers will star in a stage version of the great Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat, with music to dance cheek-to-cheek to by Irving Berlin.
Ted Chapin, president of Irving Berlin Music based here in New York, told me that he, along with two of Berlin’s daughters and a granddaughter, attended a reading in London where Summer and Tom read the parts Rogers and Astaire played in the 1935 movie — which, handily, was set in London.
‘There was a good feeling in the room,’ Chapin recalled, and what struck them all was that the story of mistaken identity (an old Rogers and Astaire standby) still held up well.
The movie had five songs: Isn’t This A Lovely Day (To Be Caught In The Rain), Cheek To Cheek, No Strings, Piccolino and the title song Top Hat (White Tie And Tails).
The new theatre show’s director Matthew White, choreographer Bill Deamer and producer Kenny Wax cherry-picked through the Berlin catalogue and also want to include Let’s Face The Music And Dance and I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket.
‘Berlin wrote a thousand songs. Within this stage Top Hat there’s a show within a show, so there’s an opportunity to use some perhaps lesser-known Berlin songs as well,’ Chapin told me.
He added that he saw Summer in that strange musical The Drowsy Chaperone and he admired her song and dance skills, plus what he called her ‘exquisite’ comic timing.
Chambers is currently in Sunderland in a sell-out production of White Christmas. He was moving on to a musical version of the film Big, but that has shrunk out of sight.
The actor wowed audiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and his Astaire routine on You Tube shows he knows how to move.
Top Hat will rehearse in July and open in Milton Keynes in August and then
tour to Birmingham, Salford, Southampton, Plymouth, Norwich, Canterbury, Marlowe and Leeds and come waltzing into London around this time next year.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1335202/Kate-Winslet-to-London-estranged-husband-Sam-Mendes-shoots-new-Bond-movie.html#ixzz172Bq3lul
Summer Strallen is ready to breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class by puttin’ on her Top Hat.
The actress and Tom Chambers will star in a stage version of the great Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat, with music to dance cheek-to-cheek to by Irving Berlin.
Ted Chapin, president of Irving Berlin Music based here in New York, told me that he, along with two of Berlin’s daughters and a granddaughter, attended a reading in London where Summer and Tom read the parts Rogers and Astaire played in the 1935 movie — which, handily, was set in London.
‘There was a good feeling in the room,’ Chapin recalled, and what struck them all was that the story of mistaken identity (an old Rogers and Astaire standby) still held up well.
The movie had five songs: Isn’t This A Lovely Day (To Be Caught In The Rain), Cheek To Cheek, No Strings, Piccolino and the title song Top Hat (White Tie And Tails).
The new theatre show’s director Matthew White, choreographer Bill Deamer and producer Kenny Wax cherry-picked through the Berlin catalogue and also want to include Let’s Face The Music And Dance and I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket.
‘Berlin wrote a thousand songs. Within this stage Top Hat there’s a show within a show, so there’s an opportunity to use some perhaps lesser-known Berlin songs as well,’ Chapin told me.
He added that he saw Summer in that strange musical The Drowsy Chaperone and he admired her song and dance skills, plus what he called her ‘exquisite’ comic timing.
Chambers is currently in Sunderland in a sell-out production of White Christmas. He was moving on to a musical version of the film Big, but that has shrunk out of sight.
The actor wowed audiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and his Astaire routine on You Tube shows he knows how to move.
Top Hat will rehearse in July and open in Milton Keynes in August and then
tour to Birmingham, Salford, Southampton, Plymouth, Norwich, Canterbury, Marlowe and Leeds and come waltzing into London around this time next year.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1335202/Kate-Winslet-to-London-estranged-husband-Sam-Mendes-shoots-new-Bond-movie.html#ixzz172Bq3lul
