After a four-year delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Imelda Staunton is finally taking on the lead role in the first West End staging of Hello, Dolly! since 1984.
The production reunites her with director Dominic Cooke after their phenomenal success with Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the National Theatre in 2017. It will bring an “old musical to a new audience”, said Staunton in conversation with Cooke on Wednesday at the London Palladium, where the show will open in July. She joked that the classic show, which became a film starring Barbra Streisand in 1969, is not so well known today. “Someone said to me: am I playing Dolly Parton?” she said with a laugh. “I’m flattered!”
Hello, Dolly! has had four Broadway revivals since its premiere in 1964, the most recent in 2017-18 with Bette Midler playing the matchmaker Dolly Levi. Its original star Carol Channing played Dolly more than 5,000 times, including in London in 1979, and the drag artist Danny La Rue took on the role in the West End soon afterwards.
Cooke and Staunton had been due to open their production at London’s Adelphi theatre in the summer of 2020 but it became one of the highest-profile shows to be delayed by the pandemic. The actor said that waiting four years to play Dolly had been both “comforting and weird” and that she wanted to give audiences a “totally joyful evening”. She recalled her own past trips to the Palladium, seeing performances by great stars including Josephine Baker and Bing Crosby (“people were singing – I was furious!”).
Staunton’s recent screen roles have included as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, which finished its sixth season in 2023. It had been a “serious, challenging and sad” experience, she said, so she was looking forward to a fun project. The role of Dolly, who finds a match for the “half a millionaire” Horace Vandergelder in Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical, is a contrast to the “anger and despair” of her other recent stage roles, such as in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Gypsy. Staunton won Olivier awards for best actress in a musical for both of those productions, as well as for Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
Cooke said that he hoped the story of Dolly, who embraces life after the death of her husband, would connect with audiences “stepping back into the world” in the wake of the pandemic.
The show, which runs at the Palladium from 6 July to 14 September, also stars Andy Nyman, Jenna Russell, Tyrone Huntley and Harry Hepple. It is produced by Michael Harrison. The musical will incorporate a song that was written for the film rather than the stage play, Just Leave Everything to Me, after Staunton called up Herman to seek his blessing. Cooke said he would also draw upon Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker, which inspired Herman and Stewart’s musical. He said that classic musicals could be both treated seriously and respectfully at the same time as being reinvented, pointing towards the recent version of Oklahoma! that transferred from the Young Vic to the West End.
Hello, Dolly! will have a lavish set and costumes from Rae Smith. The original 60s staging was “produced at the height of the Broadway musical” and was richly designed, said Cooke. Staunton agreed: “We can’t do it with two chairs and a polo-neck sweater!”
Staunton said on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday that there will be one more Downton Abbey film and that she is reprising the role of Aunt Lucy in another Paddington film. She told the Guardian at the Palladium that the West End has recovered “remarkably well” since the pandemic closed theatres but that she feared for theatres outside the capital. “I want them to be helped,” she said. “My beginnings were six years in repertory theatre, going all around the country … Theatres outside London need a helping hand.” Referring to recent local councils cutting their arts budgets, she said that hospitals and theatres should not be pitted against each other when cuts were being made. “One should not be at the expense of the other.”
Anyone disappointed to hear that Staunton is not playing Dolly Parton can at least look forward to Here You Come Again, a new musical featuring Parton’s biggest hits and endorsed by the country music legend. It opens at Leeds Playhouse in May and goes on tour prior to a West End run.
