Well, hello – this Dolly is a complete delight. Like Gypsy before it, Jerry Herman’s classic 1964 musical had to wait for a major London revival until Imelda Staunton, with her powerhouse voice and personality, got round to it.
She is the driving force of Dominic Cooke’s sumptuous, effervescent production, even bringing a note of pathos to the story’s wry wit and knockabout daftness.
Her Dolly Levi is the ultimate fixer of late 19th century New York, with a business card for every occasion, “if you want your roof inspected, eyebrows tweezed or bills collected”. Her ostensible specialism is marriage-brokering, but actually she redistributes wealth and happiness.
Though purporting to set him up with a milliner, Dolly hopes to bag grouchy “half-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman, hilarious) for herself, while also ensuring his niece marries the penniless artist she loves.
There follows an improbable but vastly entertaining web of coincidence and romance. Herman treats us to a string of classic numbers and clever lyrics, and Michael Stewart’s book is laced with fourth wall-breaking Vaudevillian humour.
From the start, with the cast striding along a travelator past projections of Victorian Manhattan, Cooke suggests a city on the move. This is a place shaped by Rockefeller and JP Morgan but also by a melting pot of immigrants: Gallaghers, Levis, Molloys, Hackls.
It’s also a place where women – widows – like Dolly and her frenemy Irene (Jenna Russell, serenely brilliant as ever) have clout. And where Vandergelder’s clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby (Harry Hepple and Tryone Huntley) start to dream above their station.
Staunton is all brightness and bounce in the introductory Just Leave Everything to Me. She’s wry and tart in the witty Motherhood March and Dancing, quietly touching in the solo Look, Love in My Window. Then she unleashes the full-on, mind-altering force of her voice in the anthemic Before the Parade Passes By, in the title song, and in the swaggeringly flippant So Long, Dearie.
She erases any lingering memories of Carol Channing, who originated the role on Broadway in her 40s, and Barbra Streisand, who was in her 20s when she played Dolly in the 1969 film. Staunton is 68, and the relative age-blindness of Cooke’s production adds a sense of passing time and fleeting happiness.
But forget that: Cooke, designer Rae Smith and choreographer Bill Deamer mostly want to flood your senses with brightness and fun. A steam train and a streetcar rumble across the stage. Staunton descends an outrageous, flower-decked restaurant staircase into a shoal of prancing waiters, their coat-tails slicing the air like scimitars.
The dance routine for Put On Your Sunday Clothes is simply joyful. Against the cutouts and projections of brownstones, the colour palette is exuberant red, fuchsia, emerald.
None of it would work without Staunton, our pre-eminent musical performer, gifted with comic timing, radiant charm and dramatic prowess as well as that formidable voice. We – and the late Jerry Herman – are lucky to have her.
