In Dominic Cooke’s stupendous production of Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium, Dolly returns from Yonkers to New York, her home city, and visits the Harmonia Gardens, her favourite restaurant. Dancing waiters in claret-coloured tails, each carrying a silver salver as if it were a trophy, go wild with excitement as soon as they hear that she is on her way. Like Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical itself, they are light on their feet, and this ecstatic scene reinforces the show’s invigorating fantasy that anybody can become a somebody through sheer force of personality, that a little old – or middle-aged – lady can turn out to be a dynamo, a fixer, a star turn. Far from age making a woman invisible, Hello Dolly!, based on Thornton Wilder’s 1938 farce, is about hi-vis mastery, and Imelda Staunton plays Dolly to perfection.
Staunton’s star quality – she shines in her emerald ballgown like a queen descending the restaurant’s appropriately golden stairs – depends on her miraculous ability to stay genuine and intent, no matter how far-fetched the goings on around her. Naturalness and charm make her a joy to watch. She gives us a Dolly who exults in being herself, yet whose eyes fill with tears whenever she consults her dear departed philanthropist husband (she is a marriage broker, arranging her own second marriage by stealth). Dolly’s quarry is the grumpy millionaire Horace Vandergelder – entertainingly performed by Andy Nyman. But Staunton makes sure that scheming never subdues sentiment, and gives a stunning – melancholy but determined – rendition of Before the Parade Passes By at the end of the first half, about catching happiness while she still can.
