A Divine Dolly

A new revival of the 1964 hit musical Hello, Dolly! is set to open on Broadway during the spring of 2017, according to TheaterMania (theatermania.com). The production will star Bette Midler as Dolly. All I have to say can be summed up in four words: It is about time!

As for many of my generation, the Divine Miss M has been a delightful fixture on the music and theater scenes over a lifetime. She captivated early on, in the days when she was delighting gay audiences, accompanied on the piano by Barry Manilow, at the Continental Baths in New York’s Ansonia Hotel, a period that produced, in 1972, her first album, The Divine Miss M. She memorialized that time in a later album, Bathhouse Betty, which was released in 1998. The Divine Miss M became a million-seller and earned her a Grammy Award as Best New Artist in 1973.

In 1979 Bette made her first movie, The Rose, and the title song will forever be associated with her. Success followed success as albums, movies, and stage performances accumulated, earning her numerous awards and a legion of devoted fans. I count myself as one of those fans, and now I’m delighted that she will be tackling the role of Dolly in a musical that I have enjoyed almost since it opened in 1964.

Hello, Dolly!, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and a book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder’s 1938 farce, The Merchant of Yonkers, which was retitled The Matchmaker in 1955, opened on January 16, 1964, at the St. James Theatre. It was David Merrick’s first show. Choreographed by Gower Champion, it starred Carol Channing, who would make it a vehicle for her lifetime. She revived it in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. I saw it during the latter period, when Channing performed at the Indiana University Auditorium. However, much earlier I saw another touring production that began in 1965 and ran for two years and nine months and saw two replacements for Channing over the course of the tour. Eve Arden was one, and Dorothy Lamour,  who gained fame in the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures of the 1940s. It was Lamour whom I saw when I was a college student in Kansas in the late 1960s.

The Bette Midler production will be the fourth Broadway revival of this iconic musical. I can hardly wait. It certainly seems to warrant a trip the Big Apple in 2017.

Love at First Set

As a thirteen-year-old seventh-grader in Germany, I had my first experience of live theater when a USO troupe brought Guys and Dolls to our military community. I was spellbound. The sets! The costumes! The lights! The music! Real live people performing right in front of our eyes. It was pure magic. And so it has been for the past half century.

The immediacy of live theater—or any live performance—produces, at its best, a miraculous humanity, a connection between viewer and performer that cannot be replicated with images on screens. Whether it’s comic, tragic, or something else scarcely matters. That it’s real people beneath the greasepaint is what counts. And the first time is enough to hook a person for life. At least it was in my case.

A few years ago we took my very skeptical fourteen-year-old godson and his family to the Broadway production of Billy Elliot. My godson, who had protested going, turned to me after the first dance number, eyes full of stars, and whispered, “This is great!” Yes! Exactly! Just yesterday, my partner took two of the grandchildren, ages eight and six, to a local production of Shrek, the Musical. They are likely to remember the experience for a lifetime.

Over the years I’ve seen a great deal of theater and dabbled at being more than a viewer. In high school I designed the set for our production of My Fair Lady, in which Eliza was played by future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest; she was a senior, I was a sophomore. A decade ago I flew to Wisconsin to watch a high school performance of my own play, Writer’s Catch, that was staged by the school where I’d taught a decade before that. But I’ve always been thrilled simply to be in the audience.

The key factor has not necessarily been who was on stage. I remember vividly seeing Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, James Earl Jones in a New York production of On Golden Pond, Peter O’Toole in a London production of Man and Superman, Yul Brynner in The King and I, and Carol Channing in Hello Dolly. (Actually I first saw Hello Dolly when Dorothy Lamour played Dolly Levi in a touring version that played Emporia, Kansas, during my undergrad years.) But I have been equally thrilled by local and university productions.

All the world may well be a stage, as Shakespeare opined, but when the house lights go down and the play begins something special happens. We are transported from the ordinary to the extraordinary by that magical, very human connection between the individuals on stage and the individuals in the audience. Curtain up! And I fall in love all over again.