'Look at the old girl now'

Hello, Dolly!, starring the charismatic veteran actress Dame Imelda Staunton, is a triumph, as is a revival of a rarely seen Shakespearean play

- Michael Billington

I HAVE never counted Hello, Dolly! among my favourite musicals. I have spent too much of my life watching armour-plated American stars swanning down that Harmonia Gardens staircase at about 9.32pm to belt out the big number. However, Dominic Cooke’s new production at the London Palladium is sheer delight and one of the reasons is the magnetic presence of Imelda Staunton as the matchmaking Dolly Levi.

As we know from her awardwinning performances in Gypsy and Sweeney Todd, Dame Imelda’s great gift is that she brings all her acting skills to musicals. From her very first line—‘I’ve always been a woman who arranges things’—we see that this Dolly is a twinkling, bright-eyed, meddlesome busybody. Dame Imelda also makes it clear that she is looking for a second chance in life, which involves marriage to a wealthy Yonkers merchant.

Her triumph comes in her delivery of Jerry Herman’s title number. Instead of turning up at the Harmonia Gardens like a showbiz star, Dame Imelda treats the song as a reminder of past happiness and turns her affectionate gaze on each of the waiters whom she individually remembers. With its element of self-mockery on the line, ‘look at the old girl now, fellas’, the whole performance offers a mas- terclass in how to refresh and reimagine one of the best-known figures in musical theatre.

Credit also belongs to Mr Cooke as director, Rae Smith as designer and Bill Deamer as choreographer for their immaculate staging of the piece. Musicals can often seem mechanical, but I had tears of pleasure in my eyes during the number Put On Your Sunday Clothes: the reason was that it caught the sheer joy of a group of suburbanites boarding a steam train and relishing the glittering prospect of a day in New York. Much of the show is about motion, with a travelator carrying the cast in one direction as the sumptuous sets speed past them the opposite way.