Anyone craving a taste of good old-fashioned razzmatazz won’t be disappointed in Hello, Dolly!, a 1964 musical served up with all the trimmings in the Palladium’s vast gilded barn. It’s overwhelmingly lavish, its flimsy plot groaning under the weight of extravagances, like the giant train that steams across the stage, or the chorus of dancing waiters bearing silver salvers bright enough to blind half the front row. Charged with bringing both heart and substance to the feast, Imelda Staunton shines in the title role.
Dolly Levi is a wonderful creation, especially in musical theatre, an art form that – the works of Stephen Sondheim aside – doesn’t always make much space for grown women. She’s a widow, matchmaker and general fixer who’s living on her wits in hectic turn-of-the-century New York. Here, she’s imbued with a sense of restless energy and bubbling mischievousness by Staunton.
Dolly has been commissioned to source a wife for Scrooge-like store owner Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman), but instead, she sets about the task of taking his life apart, juggling its pieces merrily around her head, then setting them down in her preferred order. She arranges an elopement for his wimpy niece Ermengarde (Emily Langham, who marks each entrance with the hysterical gibbers of a reprieved turkey). She sends his overworked clerks Cornelius (Harry Hepple) and Barnaby (Tyrone Huntley) on a big city jolly, where they woo two elegant ladies under false pretences. And she gradually chips away at Horace’s miserly worldview, manipulating him like a chess grandmaster toying with an arrogant schoolboy.
Director Dominic Cooke’s production is a lean mean entertainment machine – each half is a tight hour (a refreshing contrast to the more lumbering Barbra Streisand-starring 1969 movie version), kept moving by Rae Smith’s projection-filled set design and Bill Deamer’s appropriately high-spirited choreography. And although the show’s farcical climax in a hat shop feels less like a tight physical comedy set piece and more like a tipsy game of musical chairs, its larky approach can tumble away when required. When Staunton sits alone by lamplight to sing “Love, Look in My Window”, the whole story is illuminated by this insight into Dolly’s hidden loneliness.
But it’s the flashier songs that get the audience roaring to their feet. “Before the Parade Passes By” is beautifully staged here, becoming a celebration of ordinary workers who march about bearing proudly embroidered velvet banners. And title number “Hello, Dolly!” really sings, with Staunton just the right side of smug as she slinks down a staircase in bejewelled green satin, as her acolytes hymn her praises – the distilled essence of musical theatre camp. For a certain kind of fan, scenes like these aren’t just the pinnacle of musical theatre, they’re the highest summit of all human achievement.
Detractors are more likely to be bothered by the thinness of a plot where only Staunton’s Dolly has real agency or complexity, and even that only goes so deep. There’s a persistent wry humour to this portrayal of a restlessly intelligent woman who tells us that she “arranges things/ Like furniture and daffodils and lives”. Comedy number “It Takes a Woman” points out the hypocrisy of men like Horace, who expect their wives to be simultaneously frail little flowers and sturdy domestic workhorses. Can we really believe that Dolly would be satisfied, bridled to a man like him? Still, if the show’s ending doesn’t ring true, its best songs unfailingly do, making what could feel like a fusty old creation gleam more brightly than ever.
London Palladium, until 14 September