London Palladium | ★★★★✩
Dolly will forever be associated with Barbra Streisand because she starred in the film version of Jerry Herman’s 1964 musical.
Yet the hold Babs has on the role is not quite as tight as her grip on Fanny Brice of Funny Girl, the show that Broadway could not bring itself to revive until 2022 so difficult was it to imagine someone stepping into Streisand’s shoes.
And although Dolly Levi is not expressly Jewish in the way that Fanny is (Dolly’s full surname is actually Gallagher Levi and she is the widow of Ephraim Levi) the absence of Streisand’s Jewish New York inflection and gesticulation, which turns every character the star touches into a Jew as surely as Midas’s turns gefilte fish into gold, is very noticeable.
Do not let that put you off. For director Dominic Cooke’s no-holds-barred revival boasts Imelda Staunton and she, for my money, is the finest Broadway musical performer this country has produced over the last decade or two.
As the widowed matchmaker and professional “meddler”, 68-year-old Staunton’s Dolly may be younger at heart than she is in body, but she is still the driving, wise-cracking engine of this show. Just as importantly the voice lives up to the reputation it established in 2015 when the screen star wow, wow, wowed (to adapt a phrase from Hello, Dolly!’s title song) as Mama Rose in Gypsy.
That performance has rightly gone down in musical theatre history. This one probably won’t partly because Hello, Dolly! is a slighter show. Whereas the wrath embedded in Mama Rose’s ambition is a quality Staunton’s copious acting talent could gets its teeth into, Dolly Levi is by comparison a less complex and psychologically interesting character.
Still, the evening’s highs are everything they should be. And when Dolly, a multi-talented fixer of other people’s problems, performs that song at her favourite old haunt, she is accompanied by a chorus-line of stunningly well-drilled dancing waiters, thanks to Bill Deamer’s meticulous choreography. In these moments, those who saw Staunton in Gypsy will brace themselves. They will know that the star is singing at less than full power before she lets her voice off the leash.
Imelda Staunton Credit: Manuel Harlan
It happens, of course, in the second act’s showstopper Hello, Dolly!, but also during the first act in Put On Your Sunday Clothes, which is where the ambition of Cooke’s production reveals itself.
That number begins with two shop clerks in bland Yonkers imagining themselves dressed in their finest for the streets of New York. It ends thrillingly with Dolly inserting herself into the number (as she does most things) like an ocean liner’s figurehead on the steam train the clerks have boarded for the city.
They are employees of millionaire curmudgeon Vandergelder, whom Dolly plans to marry whether he likes it or not. Played by Andy Nyman in his first major musical since his tough-as-nails Tevye, the actor superbly conveys the suppressed joy that exists deep (very deep) within the deadpan merchant.
Andy Nyman Credit: Manuel Harlan
To that end he deploys perfectly timed dance moves that are all the more expressive for not being much more than a twitch. He delivers the song Penny in My Pocket with equally exacting comic timing, yet the number has none of the charm of Tevye’s If I Were A Rich Man. You need to be poor to sing about money and be liked.
And although Nyman is not quite the byword for Jewishness that Streisand is, it is still a bit of a relief when, soon after the money song, his Horace declares himself to be a Presbyterian.
