Heaven, I’m in Heaven,
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we’re out together dancing, cheek to cheek.
“Cheek to Cheek”, words and music by Irving Berlin.
Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers are known as the “Big Five” of American musical theatre. All born at the end of the nineteenth century, they embody the modernity of the twentieth century and built the Broadway empire, even before Leonard Bernstein or Stephen Sondheim. The composers of the classics of the Great American Songbook — that is, the songs that have become ingrained in the Anglo-American collective memory — they have all been featured at the Théâtre du Châtelet in recent years, with the exception of Irving Berlin. Arriving in the New York neighbourhood of the Lower East Side in 1893, he was one of many children of a synagogue cantor who had to leave Tsarist Russia due to the pogroms. Irving Berlin quickly made music his main focus.
Author and composer of nearly 1,500 songs, including White Christmas and God Bless America, Irving Berlin also wrote the hit Cheek to Cheek, from his most famous musical Top Hat, a film directed by Mark Sandrich in 1935, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which was immediately considered his masterpiece. French audiences would discover it under a different title: Le Danseur du dessus (The Dancer Upstairs), and the plot helps explain this “translation”: an American dancer, Jerry Travers, demonstrates tap dancing to his British producer and wakes up Dale Tremont, his downstairs neighbour… When she comes upstairs to complain about the noise, it’s love at first sight, and the rest of the story, set in Venice, captivates audiences with the reconstruction of the City of the Doges in a stunning papier-mache backdrop. Thanks to a skilful alternation of dance numbers and a superb final ballet, the adaptation of Top Hat into a stage musical has not betrayed the film and has become one of the greatest successes of Broadway.
SECRETS OF A WORK
To find out more about Top Hat, a presentation of the production will take place 45 minutes before the performance begins, in the Salon Diaghilev. Animated by music journalist Bertrand Dicale, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7.15 pm (free entry, reserved for ticket holders for that day’s performance).
