‘Hello, Dolly!’ – Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman; Book by Michael Stewart; Based on “The Matchmaker” by Thornton Wilder; Directed by Maggie Burrows; Choreography by William Carlos Angulo; Music Direction by Matthew Deitchman; Scenic Design by David Arsenault; Costume Design by Leon Dobkowski; Lighting Design by Richard Latta; Sound Design by Kevin Heard; and Wig/Hair & Make-Up Design by Roxanne De Luna. Presented by The Ogunquit Playhouse through July 18th.
By Mike Hoban
If you were fortunate enough to see the side-splitting pre-Broadway trial run of When Playwrights Kill at the Huntington last spring and found yourself wondering what the stars would be like in a musical comedy, wonder no more. The Ogunquit Playhouse has gotten (most of) the band back together for a riotous production of the Jerry Herman-Michael Stewart Broadway classic Hello, Dolly!, and it puts the “comedy” front and center in this musical comedy gem.
Ogunquit’s Hello Dolly! reunites Tony Award-winners Beth Leavel and Matt Doyle, as well as Adam Heller (last seen as Mr. Mushnik in OP’s Little Shop of Horrors) from When Playwrights Kill, and adds a third Tony Award-winner, Ruthie Ann Miles, to bolster the already superb cast. Further elevated by the alternately balletic and hyper-athletic choreography by William Carlos Angulo, it is everything summer revival theater should be ─ and a perfect antidote to the fire hose of disturbing political news we endure each day.
Hello, Dolly! is the latest incarnation of a one-act farce, A Day Well Spent, written by English dramatist John Oxenford in 1835, and adapted into the 1938 Broadway flop The Merchant of Yonkers by Thornton Wilder ─ who won a Pulitzer for Our Town the same year. The show fared better on Broadway in 1954, when Wilder reworked it into The Matchmaker, but achieved iconic status when it was turned into the musical comedy version starring Carol Channing that theatergoers know and love in 1964 ─ nearly sweeping the Tonys with 10 awards, a then-record.
The show’s book retains its farcical roots, seemingly designed to set up jokes and cue the wonderful musical performances rather than to create a plausible storyline. Set just before the turn of the 20th Century, Hello, Dolly! tells the story of Dolly Gallagher Levi (Leavel), a charismatic, widowed matchmaker/meddler/entrepreneur who is tired of hustling to make ends meet and decides to make a match for herself. She sets her sights on Horace Vandergelder (a blustery Heller), the “half-a-millionaire” and widower who is in the market for a wife and has contracted Dolly to make that happen. What the pair have in common is that neither is actually seeking love. Dolly wants to secure her future, and Horace is looking for a servant/concubine, as he makes clear in the entertaining but wildly sexist “It Takes a Woman,” where he sings, “It takes a woman all powdered and pink/To joyously clean out the drain in the sink!”
While Dolly and Horace may have underlying motives in their romantic pursuits, more sincere love stories drive the secondary plot. Horace’s clerks, Cornelius (Doyle) and Barnaby (Davey Fried), embark on an adventure to New York and become smitten with the shop owner, Irene Molloy (Miles), and her assistant, Minnie Fay (Susana Cordón). Horace’s niece (Emma Crow) and her artist beau (Ryan Lambert) want to marry, over Horace’s objections. Dolly, too, is in love, but it’s with her deceased husband, Ephraim Levi (whom she still converses with daily) and consults with before deciding to move on with her life in the beautiful American Songbook standard, “Before the Parade Passes By.”
Like many of our most beloved musicals, the plot is a little thin, but the songs and choreography carry the day (think Gershwin vehicle Crazy for You, for which Ogunquit created a stunning production in 2024). Miles is the vocal standout of the show, with touching versions of the only non-Dolly solo, “Ribbons Down My Back,” and a duet, “It Only Takes a Moment,” with the equally compelling Doyle. While the opening numbers aren’t particularly noteworthy, the rich harmonies in the later musical numbers by the full company are mind-blowing, especially “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” “Motherhood March,” and, of course, the show-stopping “Hello, Dolly!” The dance numbers are stratospheric, with comic numbers like “Waiters’ Gallop” and “Dancing” which is a flat-out blast.
The success of any production of Hello, Dolly! rests with its star, and Leavel, with her powerhouse vocals and inventive comic skills, was born to play this role. The mezzo-soprano is absolutely volcanic in her renditions of “Before the Parade Passes By” and “Hello, Dolly!”, and her comic instincts are Kristen Wiig-level. In one scene at the Harmonia Gardens, she clearly seems to be improvising as she drags out the scene and milks it for every comic droplet, leaving the audience breathless from laughter.
Summer theater is made for shows like this, and nobody does it better than Ogunquit. If you haven’t made the trip (75 minutes from Boston) and want to see Broadway-level shows (at much more reasonable prices), it’s time to load up the car and go. For tickets and more information, go to: https://www.ogunquitplayhouse.org.
