Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart | Hello, Dolly! / 2019

dolly will never go away again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Herman (music and lyrics), Michael Stewart (book) Hello, Dolly! / in a performance directed by Jerry Zaks / touring company with Betty Buckley in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre / the performance I saw was with Howard Fox on February 3, 2019

 

As a 49th anniversary gift to Howard I bought tickets to the traveling company of Hello, Dolly! with Betty Buckley in the starring role at the grand Hollywood Boulevard theater in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Pantages.

      That theater, to which tourists from around the area and the world flock, kept notifying me that mobile phone entrance was the only possible way to enter the gates of this paradise. We are stubborn troglodytes who refuse to have cellphones (and strangely enough, my young assistant, Pablo, is also cellphone-less), so I had to call the monstrous Ticketmaster several times to make certain that our tickets might be held a will-call, and to reassure me of the fact that we would actually be offered printed tickets. We were, and the process went quite smoothly.

      Although both of us had seen the spritely musical version in Barbra Streisand’s 1969 takedown (almost as if wrestling with all of the other film’s characters to make sure that she remained up- and-center of all scenes), and, as a younger man, I had seen Carol Channing in the role—I believe, but am not certain—in a production in Chicago on national tour, Eve Arden performing the role (also in Chicago, I realize after having googled her career), and Pearl Bailey in Washington, D.C., I felt already pretty “dollied up”, and imagined I didn’t need to see yet another performance, unless we happened to be traveling to New York, at which time I would have loved to have seen Bette Midler or Bernadette Peters in the role.

       But Howard, not even recalling the Bailey event, claimed he’d never seen a stage production, and I felt he should have that opportunity, since, despite Streisand’s remarkable singing, the stage version was what Jerry Herman’s rambunctious musical was all about. Someone like Channing doesn’t just “milk” the audience, she enchants them, making every performance feel like it was a special event just for them. With her deep raspy voice, her amazingly blithe movements through space, and her endless appetite for food, which stands in for her appetite for audience appreciation, she literally hogs the stage, creating a kind of vacuum that even Gower Champion’s lithe male dancers at the Harmonium Gardens couldn’t match. When Channing’s Dolly strolled down the restaurant stairway and went marching across the stage apron you knew she wasn’t just singing to Rudy, Manny, Stanley, and the dozens of others for which she requested an empty knee, but was greeting every single individual in that audience, asking them to allow her to wow her as much as the Harmonium Gardens waiters and Maître-d. She made you love her whether you wanted to or not. And how could you not.

       Like Howard, I remembered little of Bailey’s performance, although given her career, it must have been magnificent. Eve Arden was a good performer who made a credible Dolly which also gave me the shivers of pleasure given my loving memories of the dozens of Our Miss Brooks TV series I had seen as a child.

       Before I proceed to the rest of this review, I should also mention that I had met the composer Jerry Herman and introduced him to a celebrity audience at a party at the famed Gotham Hotel on 46th Street which I hosted for writer Jerry Lawrence, when he performed piano numbers from various of his musicals, including from not only this musical but from Dear World, with the book by Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (events which I’ve reiterated in several volumes of My Year, particularly in My Year 2005) and, a half-year later met Carol Channing briefly at another celebration for Jerry Lawrence’s book, which my press published, in Malibu, the actress with a purse perched across her head, presumably to protect her from the heavy Los Angeles sun. In a recent obituary a commentator described that she had become hair-allergic given the too many times she had died her hair blonde and red. I saw her as a gray-haired beauty, still looking like an elderly version of the Channing I had witnessed on stage.

      I have, accordingly, a rather personal relationship with this musical—although I must admit it’s never been my very favorite of Broadway entertainments.

      My very favorite of its songs, “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” Howard confirmed, this time seeing it, was his favorite as well, he admitting that tears trickled from his eyes in joy. From mine as well; but then I cry at most great musicals these days.

     The marvelous costumes and settings by Santo Loquasto, the great dancing of the ensemble, and the simple pleasure of seeing all these figures moving off from the confines of Yonkers to the big nearby city, says everything about this work before it even begins to fall into shape. Before we can even imagine it, Dolly Levi, the magician of “I can do anything,” with calling cards to match, has already convinced the constantly bawling Ermegarde (Morgan Kirner), feed and grain-purveyor Horace Vendergelder’s (Lewis J. Stadlen) rebellious daughter to run off to the city and enter a dance contest with her lover Ambrose Kemper (Garett Hawe), while promising Horace an encounter with two lovely women—one, Irene Molloy (Analisa Leaming), a truly beautiful hatseller, and the other a hired schill, Ernestina Money (Jessica Sheridan) in order to convince him that the only true woman for him is Dolly herself (Betty Buckley).

      From the moment they joyously get on that train, along with the younger rebelling workers in Horace’s shop, the romantically-inclined but totally inexperienced Cornelius Hackl and the far younger and utterly innocent yet remarkably athletic Barnaby Tucker (one of the best Broadway dancers I’ve seen for a long while, Jess LeProtto), we know we’re going to have a great adventure:

 

Beneath your parasol, the world is all the smile

That makes you feel brand new down to your toes

Get out your feathers, your patent leathers

Your beads and buckles and bows

For there's no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes.

 

     I chose this song as one of my best Musical Theater numbers in 2018. And I still think it’s one of the better works of Broadway. Once they call “All Aboard, All Aboard,” we might as well be back in Judy Garland’s world of the trolley song of Meet Me in St. Louis, a nostalgic trip into love in a world gone by.

      Dolly, amazing, arranges, seeming quite by accident, for Cornelius and Barnaby to visit Irene and her assistant Minne Fay (Kristen Hahn) at the very moment that she is scheduled to be called upon by Horace, chocolate unshelled peanuts in hand, when the two, espying their employer waiting on a nearby bench, dive into the woman’s hideaway.

      How she has arranged we never quite know, but New York City was apparently a smaller space in those days, when the city was centered on the lower part of Manhattan (14th Street is the center gathering point, it appears, where the parade goes marching by), and before Horace can even imagine it, the little hatseller has become “infested” with males crawling everywhere, within her closets and under her tables, not only strange men but the very “boys” who work for Horace back in Yonkers, who Dolly incredibly portrays as men of great fame and wealth.

      Dolly has won round one, alienating Horace from his would-be lover and his workforce, while pushing the shy young men into the arms of the two willing women and forcing Horace temporarily into the arms of the heavy-weight hoohcie-koochcie dancing Miss Money, whose appearance and even her supposed money-belts distresses the now very-confused Horace.

      We already know the conclusion of this confection’s plot: Dolly will have her way. But the question is, as the Los Angeles Times reviewer Margaret Gray asks, why? Why does the vivacious Dolly even want the rather unattractive, money-pinching Horace.

      Gray’s answer is simply “money,” that Dolly is desperate for financial support from the very moment she appears in Act 1. I really disagree. Yes, money is very important in this work, particularly since most of the play’s figures have none of it (or only 165 and some cents in the case the impoverished Cornelius). The marvelous Dolly only has the memory of it through her loving former husband Ephraim Levi, who apparently acquired his cash in order to, “pardon the expression,” spread it around like manure to make young things grow.

     If as Gray argues this, German-based, Thornton Wilder adaptation, might seem to be centered upon a Cabaret-like accumulation of money, it is, in fact, I argue, just the opposite. Dolly is a true populist, determined to intervene in the capitalist system in order to spread the wealth around—while totally enjoying herself in the process or even gorging herself with the good food money allows. She is completely disinterested in money except for how it can be meddled with, taken out of the purses of the people like the half-millionaire Horace and put properly into the pockets of the poor workers such as Cornelius, Barnaby, Ambrose, and the Rudy, Manny, Stanley-like waiters. She, herself, in the years since her husband’s death, had to live, apparently, hand-to-mouth, creating a thousand personas in order to imagine her place in the world.

      If Dolly is a bigger-than-life creature, a woman whom, finally, Horace, in his marriage proposal will describe as a “wonderful woman,” it is all about her utter ferocity, her refusal to hear anyone deny her identity. And that is why the actress who portrays her must be so very larger than life.

     Channing clearly was. I am sure Midler (who I have not seen in this production), was just such a figure. Buckley is almost there, at times channeling Channing in her low alto rolls of voice. And if there is anyone who is a true stage doyenne, it is Buckley. She rules the stage as she has in many a role. She has generally played sad figures, singing with a high alto, beautifully wailing voice as in her role as Grizabella in Cats or in Sunset Boulevard. And those roles and others have shown us what a truly remarkable musical and theatrically-based artist she is.

     But at 71 (my age precisely, when I can no longer even imagine such a stage performance), she sings now in a lower alto voice, and doesn’t quite have the ability nor apparently the desire to strut out upon the stage the way Dolly must in order to make herself totally believable (or some might some claim, unbelievable). Don’t get me wrong: Buckley is a true star, an artist who I highly admire. Yet she just doesn’t somehow have the pizazz of the Dolly in the script, who apparently can transform everything she sees into something else.

     We love Buckley in a slight memory of her greatness, if not as much in her presence. Yes, she lifts up her dress a bit and even attempts to convince us of her dancing skills. But alas, in both voice and gams she’s simply not the Dolly we need to convince us of the magic the character achieves, bringing the entire Yonkers community into her domain and suddenly forcing even the grumpy Horace of her amazing transformative gifts, let alone allowing the gods to let her former loving husband speak through her new fiancé’s voice.

     Still, I’d go again to this lovely production, and stand up to applause for the lovely songs she belts out. And, of course, to shed tears for the beautiful songs, “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” “Hello, Dolly!,” and “It Only Takes a Moment.” Love is like that. Over the years, I guess, I have come to love this musical too much to ever be able to totally abandon it. In my mind, “Dolly will never [entirely] go away again.”

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 4, 2019).