She's the cabaret siren, bringing a blaze of Broadway glamour, old Hollywood shimmer and flame-haired icons to Ripon – and she cannot, she insists, do a show without funny bones.

There is a particular kind of performer who walks into a room and instantly rearranges its atmosphere. Amber Topaz is one of those. Ask her to describe herself, and she doesn't pause for more than a heartbeat: "All singing, all dancing, comedy explosion." She laughs as she says it, but she means every word.

Her new show Red - a glittering musical revue celebrating the flame-haired sirens of stage and screen - is making its way to Ripon Arts Hub on the back of a career that has taken Topaz from Edinburgh Fringe to New York, from Helsinki to Australia, from the Blackpool Tower Ballroom to the Savoy and the Indigo at the O2. For an intimate venue in a cathedral city in North Yorkshire, this is serious casting.

The show is a love letter to the redheaded trailblazers who rewrote the rules of performance—Rita Hayworth, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, Gwen Verdon, and Jessica Rabbit—served up with what Topaz calls "a slice of old Hollywood with a dash of the West End and Broadway". It is, by any measure, a lot of women for one stage. She is entirely equal to the task.

The genesis of Red traces back to a single viewing, in 2019, of the FX mini-series Fosse/Verdon. "I just thought Gwen Verdon was phenomenal," Topaz says. "I didn't really know much about her, and I thought it would be wonderful to write a show about redheaded musical theatre stars. That was the kernel that sparked it. From that kernel, she began pulling on threads that turned out to be inextricably woven together. She had been told, repeatedly and by different people, that she reminded them of Bette Midler, of Bernadette Peters, and of others in this same constellation. The question nagged at her. "I'm not imitating — I'm celebrating," she says. "But it was interesting to see when you look into it: the humour of Bette Midler, the same kind of energy, that showgirl-funny, don't-take-yourself-too-seriously but also singer-actress quality. I'd been likened to so many of them. That also became part of the journey."

Her own hair, she confides with some amusement, is no longer red. "I'm a natural strawberry blonde, and I have allowed nature to take its course." She has the skin of a redhead and, she suspects, the personality of one. But thanks to what she describes as pin-up culture and the magnificent art of the drag queen, extraordinary wigs are now very readily available. The show goes on.

Topaz came up through musical theatre proper –Les Misérables at the Palace Theatre, touring with Ron Moody – but the transition to creating her own work was, she says, a fundamental reorientation of power. "When you audition, you're already in a power play. You're hoping someone offers you a role. When you start to create your own work, you're giving yourself the role. You're in the driving seat." The relief in the telling is still palpable. "I'm very creative, and when you're in a show for a long time, it can feel like you're living in someone else's vision." Her solo work, including the provocatively titled Rude Awakening: Sex, Shame and Liberation, taught her something she has carried forward into Red: the value of genuine, unmediated connection with an audience. "In solo shows I'm me – telling a story. That's the pull for me. You think of yourself as a tapestry, and everything you do informs what you do moving forward."

The all-singing, all-dancing, comedy-explosion performer who lit up New York, dazzled Helsinki, and filled the Blackpool Tower Ballroom is bringing her blaze of glamour, wit, and hard-won joy to an intimate North Yorkshire stage

For Red, she brought in Nikki Woollston to direct and choreograph – an inspired choice. Woolston has just made her Broadway debut as associate director on Sondheim's Old Friends and is currently resident director of the global Les Misérables tour. The collaboration began as choreography and deepened naturally into something more. 'As we were working together, there was definitely an element of direction, and then I found out she'd directed Barry Humphries' shows and worked with Meow Meow, and I said, "Would you consider also directing this?" Topaz had never shared the creative driving seat before. "It was just so lovely to have someone to bounce off and create with. It's more than someone helping you mould the vision together —it's someone who really gets what you do."

The show moves across an extraordinary range in a single evening—Everything's Coming Up Roses, I'm Still Here, Roxie, and Maybe This Time—and Topaz inhabits each number from the inside rather than the surface. "It's not me impersonating," she says firmly. "It's this song, sung in my voice, in my own way—or as the character, as I would play the character." The transitions between figures are achieved through the alchemy of music and the smallest of costume adjustments. "Music changes the way I move," she says simply.

And then there is the comedy, which is never far away. It is, she insists, simply part of who she is. "I've got funny bones," she says. "I can't make a show without a lot of humour." The balance of showstopping numbers and laughs is, she suggests, less a design decision than an expression of character, which is precisely why it works.

A slice of old Hollywood with a dash of the West End and Broadway.

For anyone who has never experienced cabaret or wonders whether such an event is their kind of evening, Topaz is warmly persuasive. "I want them to feel that they are part of something," she says. "Cabaret is much more immersive, much more inclusive. You're not watching a story unfold at a distance. You are part of the experience."

During the pandemic, she admits, she wondered whether it might be time to slow down, to step away. Then the stages reopened and she walked back on, and the answer came immediately and without ambiguity. "Oh," she thought. "That's been missing. That's home."

It is, in the end, exactly that feeling she wants to hand across the footlights to everyone who takes their seat in Ripon. The all-singing, all-dancing, comedy-explosion performer who lit up New York, dazzled Helsinki, and filled the Blackpool Tower Ballroom is bringing her blaze of glamour, wit, and hard-won joy to an intimate North Yorkshire stage—and she intends every person in that room to leave feeling, just as she does when the lights go up, that they have been somewhere that felt unmistakably, gloriously like home.

Red plays at Ripon Arts Hub 49 Allhallowgate, Ripon, as part of Ripon Theatre Festival. July 8 @ 7:30 pm - 9:10 pm. Click here for tickets