In showbiz as in life, older women complain of feeling ‘invisible’. Happily, that's not a problem at the Palladium, where – ‘wow, wow, wow, fellas, look at the old girl now, fellas!’ - Imelda Staunton is making herself gloriously seen and heard in Dominic Cooke's lavish revival of ‘Hello, Dolly!’.
Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's midlife musical romcom is a goofy love letter to Dolly, a widow who takes a train to Yonkers, fixes everyone else’s romantic problems and eventually her own. I'd say Staunton’s stronger and more age appropriate casting for Dolly than Barbra Streisand was in the 1969 movie. Petite, rosy-cheeked and indomitable, Staunton doesn't have Streisand's clarion pipes or goddessy physicality, or indeed the gorgeous jammy-voiced assistance of Louis Armstrong. But she crushes it as Dolly, making her a puckish nemesis who wreaks havoc in the boring life of Horace Vandergelder, stingy ‘half millionaire’, and oppressor of nieces and clerks. Staunton is a consummate actress who can also sing, not the other way around. The farcical, goofy storyline bustles and hustles constantly, but Staunton cuts through the noise, not with front and brass but with touching subtlety and emotional depth.
Cooke's show is a big old-fashioned bells and whistles production with impressive hoofing choreography and the rare pleasure of a real orchestra. It needs to be to fill the iconic London Palladium and justify the New York prices. It is a bit flat in the first half hour, Vandergelder's hay and feed store is a dull and hokey place full of the sexist quips and dancing farmhands so strangely loved by classic American musicals. The action feels thin and strung out in front of sliding photographic backdrops of roofs and skies and such. Then a lifesize steam train rolls on and things perk up marvellously and keep on perking.
Dolly is front and centre of everything but there is charming work from all the smaller roles. Emily Lane and Jenna Russell are just lovely as a pair of bored milliners looking for kicks. They find them and then some in Tyrone Huntley and Henry Hepple whose double act as Vandergelder's oppressed clerks had me grinning from ear to ear. Everyone loves a dance makeover, when a clumsy and shy soul discovers in the course of a five-minute routine that they got the moves, and Huntley and Hepple make it feel like you're seeing one for the first time.
Some elements of the show are annoying. The moving stage is distractingly overused, with the poor actors forced to sing or shout stuff while striding or hopping to stand still on the moving walkway, like they're heading for gate 294 at Heathrow. There wasn't a whole lot of chemistry going on between Dolly and Vandergelder. But that doesn't matter so much: the true showstopping romnce in ‘Hello, Dolly!’ is between a woman and a dozen high kicking silver service waiters, a staircase and a fancy hat. Meaning it's about self-confidence, finding a community and a place that loves you, and putting on a terrific performance. And there's no complaints from me on the last score: this is a terrific old-fashioned show which audiences love, and it knows it.