Dolly can’t get beyond ‘Hello’
Thought experiment: What happens when you drain characters of almost all real feeling yet can’t quite exaggerate their foibles into camp? What’s left? Can that theatrical no-man’s-land signify or offer anything more than an empty “hello,” an acknowledgment that you exist, and so do I?
The characters in “Hello, Dolly!” — which opened Wednesday, Feb. 20, at SHN’s Golden Gate Theatre — might tell you their feelings are real, that they really are in love, but it’s impossible to believe them, and there’s little fun in the insistence. “He’s rich, so I love him!” proclaims scene after scene, character after character, yet without a clown’s zing or a lampooner’s cocked eyebrow. No, we’re meant to take that assertion at least semi-seriously, as if gold digging is right and good, natural and unalterable.
When Irene (Analisa Leaming) and Minnie (Kristen Hahn) titteringly applaud the free spending
of escorts Cornelius (Nic Rouleau) and Barnaby ( Jess LeProtto), when the rich Mr. Vandergelder (Lewis J. Stadlen) pursues the boorish Ernestina ( Jessica Sheridan) because he thinks she’s even richer than he is, then drops her when he learns she isn’t, you might forget that “Hello, Dolly!” is supposed to be a fluffy musical comedy. It feels more like a cynical portrait of vice, but where the cynicism is lazy, unexamined.
The one real relationship in the 1964 Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman show is between Dolly (Betty Buckley), matchmaker and card-carrying jill of all trades, and her dead husband, Ephraim. Will he consent to her pursuing Mr. Vandergelder, even as she still talks to him, quotes him, looks wistfully back to their time together?
Buckley, a Tony winner for “Cats,” has the depth and thoughtfulness to imbue even an anodyne “hello” with layers of feeling, to bring a lost marriage’s joy and sadness to each of the countless refrains of that infernal title song. If her singing often strains, her ease and intimacy with a stadium-sized audience seems effortless. As she parades back and forth, she makes you think that you’ve known her your whole life and that with those repeated hellos, you’re welcoming and embracing a long lost friend.
Director Jerry Zaks knows how to send a stage aswirl with activity. The movement of the waitstaff at the Harmonia Gardens restaurant, where all the couples descend, is as fluid and geometric as that of a synchronized swim team, but one that makes clapping cymbals out of lidded serving dishes, swords out of shish kebab skewers. (Warren Carlyle did the choreography, based on original choreography by Gower Champion.) Santo Loquasto’s costume design (which won one of the four 2017 Tony Awards that went to this revival) serves a feast of palettes and patterns, combining chartreuse and magenta and bronze in one scene, then sherbet orange and turquoise in another. He misses no opportunity for lavish display; underneath Dolly’s copious skirts, she wears checkerboard or striped stockings, even though you might see them only for the instant of a single swish.
As Cornelius, the clerk who at age 33 still hasn’t kissed a woman, Rouleau has an assured yet tender tenor that makes the show’s music suddenly seem like more than just filler. As dorky hatmaker’s assistant Minnie, Hahn devises a whole comic idiom, frothing and chewing her way through one line, bopping up and down with anxiety the next, then opening and closing her mouth as if she were a fish.
Yet all this talent and skill can’t paper over paper-thin feeling. In one song, “It Takes a Woman,” all the men in the cast sing a paean to housewives: “She’ll work until infinity. Three cheers for femininity.” This “Hello, Dolly!” presents that fantasy without criticism or distancing, and it’s an almost all-white vision, too, with the show’s few ensemble members of color frequently sidelined to the far corners of the stage.
But it would take more than more inclusive and thoughtful casting to save this musical, to show us what more “Dolly!” has to offer in 2019 other than a jaundiced, retrograde view of human relations, flimsily disguised in a smiley greeting.