Top Hat

If you want only one Astaire-Rogers musical, Top Hat is obligatory for Astaire at his most debonair...

Irving Berlin’s classic songs Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat, White Tie and Tails are great, and Astaire swirls on a forward-tilting gyroscopic axis with his spindly arms and legs effortlessly orbiting him like Saturn’s moons.

To watch them is to see hard work elevated to effortless joy: The work of twodancers who know they can do no better than this, and that no one else can doas well.