Brace yourselves for Dolly fever. Next year, Broadway is hosting its eighth revival of “Hello, Dolly!” with Bette Midler as Dolly.
One of the most popular musicals of all time, it is just the sort of crowd-dazzler Riverside likes to time so that the opening-night performance is the climax of its annual spring fundraiser.
The classic 1964 musical comedy by Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart is based on a one-act farce written nearly 200 years ago, extended by an Austrian into a full-length play, then Americanized by Thornton Wilder into “The Merchant of Yonkers.” That play was mounted on Broadway and was a dismal flop. Wilder went back to work. He noticed a minor figure buried in the narrative, one Dolly Levi. Fleshing her out and bringing her to the fore in “The Matchmaker,” it’s the story of a widow in turn-of-the-last-century Yonkers, New York, who makes her living arranging marriages. She sets her sights on one of her own clients, the dour-faced owner of a feed store, and after throwing out a few possibilities that she sabotages on the side, she positions herself to land the old grump in the end.
Producer David Merrick made the show a hit on Broadway in 1955. Nine years later, he decided to add music and hired collaborators Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart, and cast Carol Channing as Dolly. In the 1969 movie version, then 27-year-old Barbra Streisand starred.
There’s little question that Bette – just as Carol and Barbra and a slew of others before her – will be a little more playful with her Dolly than Riverside’s star, though Michele Ragusa’s self-assured Dolly and Adam Heller’s authoritative Horace grounded a live-wire cast.
Even if sparks never flew between the two leads, Riverside has created a spectacular. The season’s pinnacle production has a top-drawer cast of 34 (and that also goes for Riverside’s acting apprentices in the ensemble). And the show’s appeal owes much to its off-stage staff, who have very apparently given this show their all.
From the hand-tooled bas-relief along the stage’s proscenium to the three-car choo-choo that chugs along the stage, it seems no expense or effort was spared in executing Cliff Simon’s set. Credit goes to Joe Truesdale, who oversaw the set construction and himself made those proscenium pieces.
And behind the scenery of Victorian shops and restaurants hung gorgeous backdrops of old New York painted by Riverside’s scenic designer Dusty Terrell.
Those sets were enhanced, if that’s possible, by the splendor of the lavish costumes of Kurt Alger, who has become a Riverside regular after shows like “Crazy for You,” “South Pacific,” “Funny Girl” and “Miss Saigon.”
The ensemble of terrific male dancers includes a national champion gymnast from the University of Florida, Jeremy Miranda. And if you didn’t know his face, you probably couldn’t pick him out – they are all that good, exuberant in solos and in unison in the ensemble pieces including the intricately timed, explosively delivered “The Waiters’ Gallop” at the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant.
The visual component of the choreography is often played against the set itself. In “It Takes a Woman,” in Horace Vandergelder’s feed store, the V-shape of an open ladder is echoed in the men as they executive an explosive series of Russian splits.
And the women, dressed in the taffeta gowns, mile-wide hats and piled-high wigs of Kurt Alger, become a part of a kaleidoscope of shifting shapes in director James Brennan’s choreography. Or in “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” when they bounce along holding their skirts out behind them in wing-like wedges, as if migrating butterflies had just alighted in Grand Central Station.
Without a doubt, the show’s cast delivered on Dolly’s wonderful music. Jazmin Gorsline is a particularly beautiful singer who performed in the Cameron Mackintosh National Tour of “My Fair Lady” and played in “Carnival!” at the Kennedy Center. She played a sweet Irene Malloy, one of the most dignified of the show’s characters. Mrs. Molloy is a young widow who owns a hat shop, and she is Horace’s original target for proposal. Gorsline sings the minor key shifts in “Ribbons Down My Back” with poignancy, hoping that her ribbons in the summer breeze might “stir a rainbow up behind me and catch the gentleman’s eye.”
As it turns out, the eye Mrs. Malloy catches is not Horace’s, but that of the handsome Cornelius, played by Jeff Sears, who was in “Avenue Q” off-Broadway and on the first national tour of “Book of Mormon.” Fellow clerk at the feed store Barnaby (played wonderfully by Barnaby Tucker, a phenomenal dancer who played in “Book of Mormon” and was Race in “Newsies” on Broadway) is smitten with Minnie Fae, the helper at the hat shop, played by Alyssa Malgeri and a strong source of laughs in the show.
Horace, the huffing, puffed-up hay and feed purveyor, is a “well-known, unmarried, half-millionaire,” as Dolly puts it. It isn’t clear what else might draw her to him; as he says himself, he’s “rich, friendless and mean. In America, that’s about as far as you can go.”
But drawn to him she is. Not willing to let the parade pass her by – probably the show’s best tune after “Hello, Dolly!” (Louis Armstrong’s version finally bumped the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot) – she asks the spirit of her late husband Ephraim for permission to remarry. “I’ve begun to realize that for a long time, I haven’t shed one tear, nor have I been for one moment outrageously happy.” She says Horace always says the world’s full of fools. Then she asks whether she’d rather be a “fool among fools, or a fool alone.”
As the late playwright’s sister, Francine Pascal, told me the morning of the show’s opening gala, the story Michael Stewart wrote is essentially a love story. But it seems to me all Dolly’s orchestrated love – including for Horace – is just a ripple effect, and the stone in the pond was Ephraim’s passing. Maybe Ragusa played it straight to make that point.
