Seeing Red — And Loving Every Minute

Group Editor Andrew Palmer steps into the crimson-tinged darkness for the second night of the Ripon Theatre Festival — and discovers that an evening celebrating redheads is no place for the faint-hearted, the rhythmically restrained, or anyone who left their jazz hands at home. He emerged several shades redder, considerably more glamorous, and entirely unable to stop humming.


There are shows you attend and shows you inhabit. Red, Amber Topaz's dazzling musical revue celebrating the flame-haired sirens of stage and screen, falls emphatically into the second category. By the time the evening is done, you will have travelled from Old Hollywood to the West End to Broadway, via — and this is not a sentence you write every day — a gay sauna in the Alps.

Ripon Arts Hub was dressed for the occasion: darkened, intimate, splashed with crimson, the room already promising something a little dangerous before a note had been sung. Cabaret needs atmosphere the way a good martini needs a twist, and this delivered both.

Amber Topaz herself is a force of theatrical nature. Hair flicks, facial gymnastics, and comic asides deployed with sniper precision — she commands a room the way Mamma Rose commands a stage, which is to say completely and without negotiation. She embodies Rita Hayworth, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, Lucille Ball and a glorious procession of other redheaded icons with the ease of someone trying on coats she already owns. Each character lands with its own distinct texture. Each one fits.

The evening is structured as a kind of shrine to musical theatre herstory, and the material is impeccably chosen. If They Could See Me Now from Sweet Charity was a genuine crowd-pleaser — Amber wringing every drop of comic longing from Charity's dizzy, hopeless romanticism. The Miss Hannigan (Annie) number produced one of the evening's best visual gags: a couple of vodka shots deployed as spectacles, held to the eyes with the weary grandeur of a woman who has entirely given up. She pulled it off magnificently, which is to say she played drunk with the commitment of someone stone cold sober.

A kazoo appeared at one point. "Welcome to my mind," Amber announced, and honestly, you were glad to be there.

The name-dropping was a particular pleasure — delivered with warmth and genuine theatricality. Her account of Bernadette Peters, threaded through songs from Sondheim, balanced reverence and mischief perfectly. And the Bonnie Langford anecdote — concerning verbal diarrhoea, a ginger-related jam, and a friend who suggested that Amber herself might consider hitting mute — brought down the house with the precision of a perfectly timed rimshot.
There were personal revelations too. When she mentioned that she first sang songs from Gypsy at the age of fifteen at Rotherham Civic Theatre, you understood something about where all this comes from.

The material isn't just performed. It is, in some sense, lived.
Making Love Alone — the song about singledom — was raunchy, hilarious and delivered with the kind of comic timing that makes an audience feel it is being let into a secret. The man behind me had been foot-tapping since approximately the opening number and by this point appeared to be in a state of near-spiritual transport.

Red is, in short, that kind of show: the sort that has you deploying jazz hands on the bus home whether you intended to or not.

The torch songs gave Amber room to show what her voice can genuinely do. Everybody Loves a Winner from Cabaret was a reminder that behind all the spectacle and the perfectly judged camp is a serious singer.

She closed the first half with Broadway bangers and an invitation to sing along, the audience needing little encouragement. The second half opened with Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, the room already warm, already hers. And then The Showgirl Must Go On — part anthem, part manifesto — brought the whole glorious evening to a close in exactly the style it deserved: superb, defiant, and utterly showstopping.

Red is nostalgic, funny, raunchy, touching, and as glamorous as a showgirl's inseam is long. It is cabaret doing what cabaret does best: taking you somewhere you didn't quite know you needed to go, then refusing to let you leave until you've had another drink and admitted you're having the time of your life.

Seeing red has never felt so good.



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