WELL HELLO!! I must say, that this iconic, long-running, Tony-Award-winning musical HELLO DOLLY! has never been a fave of mine and I’ve seen a few incarnations of its heroine including the divinely daffy Carol Channing’s signature stage turn and Barbra Streisand’s miscast movie version. AIMEE DOHERTY brings her musical theater chops, deepened vocals, comic timing, and plenty of pluck and pep to the part. She’s killing it in the title role on the LYRIC STAGE in an exuberant production directed by Maurice Emmanuel Parent! The entire cast and crew have put on their “Sunday best” at a time when many of us are feeling down and out.
The show is set at the colorful turn of the last century (costumes and lighting lovely -Kelly Baker & Karen Perlow, respectively) and packages possibility and resilience in the person of a New York widow named Dolly Gallagher Levi. She’s a big, bold, brassy powerhouse of determination, who meddles in everything and with everyone who crosses her path. Whether they need a match made in heaven or mandolin lessons, Dolly’s got a business card at the ready. She knows exactly what she wants: a second husband, and she’s got her sights set on the richest guy in Yonkers: a widower named Horace Vandergelder (Joshua Wolf Coleman) the famous but miserly “half-a-millionaire”! The quaintness of the moniker earned a cynical giggle from the matinee audience now that billionaires are a dime a dozen. Vandergelder has no intention of marrying Dolly until she makes up his mind.
The book finds Dolly concocting a series of elaborate schemes in hot pursuit of her unwitting prey between Horace’s Hay and Feed store in Yonkers, and the posh Harmonia Gardens Restaurant in NYC– all of it backgrounded by Janie E. Howland’s multi-tiered set featuring the NYC skyline punctuated by the Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty. Parent’s direction involves the entire theater top to bottom, side to side, in and out of the audience.
The cast populates a crazy plot involving young lovers, the gangly Ambrose (Stephen Caliskan) and Horace’s whiny niece Ermengarde (Sophie Shaw) trying to win a polka contest; a couple of milliners charmingly voiced by Kristian Espiritu as Irene Molloy and her sidekick Temma Beaudreau who mistake Vandergelder’s employees Cornelius (a terrific Michael Jennings Mahoney) and Barnaby (Max Connor) for a couple of high rollers out on the town. Around them is an ensemble wittily choreographed by Ilyse Robbins –leaping, cartwheeling, pirouetting and kicking up their heels in kaleidoscopic sequences designed to ramp up the high spirits and hi-jinks. Jackson Jirard and Sean Keim are a dazzling dancing duo, and Mark Linehan as Rudoph the grand Maitre’d taps up a storm and sends up the supercilious swells in his dining room.
A live orchestra (Dan Rodriguez , Music Director) delivers a remarkably catchy score which surprised me with more hooks than I remember for composer/lyricist Jerry Herman to hang his legendary hat on. The hits kept on coming (the title tune is the least of them) from the ironic “It Takes A Woman,” the bittersweet yearning of “Ribbons Down My Back,” the unadulterated romance of “It Only Take A Moment,” to the irrepressible “Before The Parade Passes By.”
Maybe I’ve convinced myself I do like this show. I certainly can’t argue with its wisdom which comes by way of Dolly’s late husband Ephraim whose words find their way from the grave to Horace’s mouth when he finally surrenders to Dolly’s lust for life: “Money is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about, encouraging young things to grow.” Tell it to congress. SEE HELLO DOLLY at LYRIC STAGE through June 22!
