Hello, Dolly!: Ogunquit Playhouse Puts On Its Sunday Clothes

Beth Leavel as Dolly Levi and company in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Six decades on, Hello, Dolly! is seen as a prime representative of the golden age of Broadway musicals, but the fact is, that era was rolling into its final years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the bitterness of the Vietnam War wore it down. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder farce The Matchmaker, set in Gilded Age New York, lasted on Broadway for seven years and toured for longer, but its producer, David Merrick, turned it into a vehicle with revolving-door stars stepping in to play the marriage broker Dolly Levi, most of them relics from the 1940s. And the musical, with its overweight production values and its thin farce plot – about how the marriage broker Dolly Levi, commissioned by the Yonkers hay and feed shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder to find him a wife, captures him for herself while abetting the courtship of three young couples – grew more arthritic as time pressed on. When Barbra Streisand took over the title role in the otherwise plodding 1969 movie, her astonishing stockpile of talents and unique old-style/new-style presence lit up the fading material like fireworks; she was a godsend. But what contemporary mountings of Hello, Dolly! have shown – from the version at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2013 to the triumphant 2017 Broadway revival to the newly opened one at the Ogunquit Playhouse – is that, liberated from the notion that audiences are paying to watch a guest star in a variety show, it can be a first-rate entertainment.

The irresistible Ogunquit Playhouse production, which runs through July 18, showcases a cast without a single weak spot and contains as many visual surprises as an advent calendar. That’s not the first comparison that comes to mind, however: it’s more like a shifting jigsaw puzzle, with Maggie Burrows’s staging and William Carlos Angulo’s choreography and the inventive set designed by David L. Arsenault constantly bringing the stage picture together in fresh new ways. The permutations are the show’s central running gag, whether they take the form of a moving trolley car pulled by a cardboard cut-out horse or the New York City-bound train pulling out of Yonkers Station and swinging from one perspective to another as if we were tracking it on a movie screen – a tactic Arsenault cheerfully borrows from the 1978 musical On the Twentieth Century. The second act opens with the longest and most elaborate scene, set at the Harmonia Gardens, which climaxes with the beloved title number; Burrows and Arsenault incorporate a two-part reveal so that we can see the final touches on the scene shift. And Burrows’s staging is kinetic. In the big scenes, the ensemble arrives not en masse but in twos and threes, so your eye is never permitted to rest. Angulo picks up that idea in his choreography, especially in the marvelous “Before the Parade Passes By” number at the end of act one, where the 14th Street Parade reveals its delights, each distinctive, one at a time, the chorus slipping modestly on from an upstage left corridor and moving off stage right in a looping diagonal.

Ruthie Ann Miles as Irene Malloy and Matt Doyle as Cornelius Hackl. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

One of the ways in which the show creates its unusual pop-up range is through the contrasting energies of the principals. As Cornelius Hackl, the chief clerk at Horace’s store, who persuades his younger co-worker, Barnaby Tucker, that they need to treat their skinflint boss’s absence as an excuse for a Manhattan adventure, Matt Doyle underlines his character’s exuberance with a touching fervency. The Cornelius subplot is the most appealing throughline in the musical; it’s a coming-of-age story. But Doyle never lets us forget that the clerk is experiencing a delayed coming of age: he’s in his early thirties, and the woman he finds, in her fancy New York hat shop, Irene Molloy, is a widow, played here by the exquisite Ruthie Ann Miles. Their story is decorated by farce mechanics, but Doyle and Miles get beneath them to the longing in these characters to grab hold of life before it’s too late. Miles makes you feel it even in her first-act solo, “Ribbons Down My Back,” which she sings serenely and acts poignantly. I loved Kate Baldwin as Mrs. Molloy in the Broadway revival, but I’ve never seen anyone find as much subtext in this song as Miles. Burrows brings tremendous intelligence to her direction of Miles and Doyle; she pauses to accentuate the instant when they fall in love, during the “Dancing” number. Barnaby (Davey Fried, an adorable clown whose face never stops moving) and Irene’s assistant Minnie Fay (Susana Cordón, who has crack timing and tiny bubbles in her voice), circle these two like charming younger counterparts, bopping alongside them. In “Dancing,” where Dolly (Beth Leavel) teaches the men to dance so they can make a respectable showing at the Harmonia Gardens café, Doyle’s efforts make him look like an enchanted scarecrow while Fried resembles a wind-up toy trying to act courtly. And loping across the stage at intervals is the third young couple, Ambrose Kemper (Ryan Lambert) and Horace’s histrionic niece Ermengarde (Emma Crow), like misplaced quotation marks chasing a phrase that’s flown ahead of them.

I never noticed before that Irene Molloy is an echo of the musical’s heroine, Dolly, who has also survived a husband she adored (and continues to address throughout the play) and is fighting her way back into life, in her case in middle age. Leavel is a crackling, expansive Dolly who brings not only a vaudevillian force and hilarity to the role but infuses each one of her big numbers (“I Put My Hand In,” “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” “Dancing,” “Before the Parade Passes By,” “So Long, Dearie” and the title song) with a different emotional color and, notwithstanding the stamina the part demands, doesn’t shortchange any of them. True to the conviction of this production, she finds moments to break open the emotional core of each one, especially “Parade,” to which she lends a tremulous hopefulness. The night I saw it she literally stopped the show during “Hello, Dolly!” – which is precisely what the number is meant to do. I loved Leavel’s performance as Laura Osnes’s mother in Bandstand, and I could see traces of the wit and grounded quality of that character in her Dolly. Cast opposite Leavel is Adam Heller (her real-life husband), who, like both David Hyde Pierce in the Broadway revival and his successor, Victor Garber, wisely underplays Horace, which has the effect of humanizing a character that previous incarnations reduced to a curmudgeonly caricature.

Angulo and his team of gifted dancers turn the musical into a splendid panoply of big numbers, including the “Waiters’ Gallop” in the Harmonia Gardens episode. (The only song that falls flat is “Motherhood,” which never works because it doesn’t make sense. It’s supposed to operate as a device for Dolly and Irene to get the two clerks out of her millinery so that Horace, who has appeared inopportunely, won’t catch them on holiday while they’re supposed to be minding his store, but they never leave.) The show looks lovely – candied – especially the clothes. This production emphasizes the contrast between the cosmopolitan New York of the Gay Nineties and the cozy backwater Yonkers. The costume designer, Leon Dobkowski, has a lot of fun with this concept, especially when in the hats: when half a dozen local men saunter into Horace’s shop (and provide vocal back-up for “It Takes a Woman”), no two wear the same head covering. The generous joke here is that Yonkers has its own sense of style. But of course it’s in the streets of the big city and on the floor of Harmonia Gardens that Dobkowski really gets to show off. Everyone involved in this Dolly deserves kudos, including the lighting designer, Richard Latta, the wigmaker, Roxanne De Luna, and of course the music director, Matt Deitchman. The show ushers in the summer in high style.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.