“Hello, Dolly!” at London Palladium

Mark Shenton in the West End
19 July 2024

“Well hello, Dolly, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong”, the chorus of 12 impeccably attired waiters sing by way of welcoming Dolly Levi back to the 14th Street New York cabaret restaurant the Harmonia Gardens; but it’s equally apt to welcome Imelda Staunton back to the London musical stage for the first time since she headlined two other Broadway classics, Sweeney Todd and Gypsy.

Imelda Staunton as Dolly.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

No, Jerry Sherman’s 1964 musical Hello, Dolly! (with a book by Michael Stewart) isn’t quite in the same dramatic or musical league as those iconic shows. But as an engine to motor an evening of utterly delightful escapist joy and pleasure, it’s still hard to beat, especially when invested with as much pure love and deep respect as director Dominic Cooke and his invaluable choreographer Bill Deamer provide here.

They – and their star – bring real emotion and vulnerability to this story, based on a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder of a lonely widow who makes a living as a professional meddler, or fixer, in other people’s lives, helping them to solve some of life’s many problems, until she finally resolves to fix her own. Instead of arranging marriages for other people, she becomes determined to do so for herself.

This much isn’t a spoiler, as she telegraphs her intentions early on – the show is an extended, and often hilariously comic, riff on how she achieves it. Though it is quite a laboriously achieved result, the show floats on its sheer warmth, and the seemingly effortless élan of both its star and its staging.

Producer Michael Harrison, who is also responsible for the spectacular annual pantomimes that have become a Christmas institution here, has let his creative team loose with a similarly open invitation to spare no expense. So designer Rae Smith cuts no corners, bringing even a life-size train locomotive onto the huge Palladium stage, and flooding the stage with colourfully elegant costumes from the turn of the 20th century that are entirely ravishing.

Andy Nyman, Tyrone Huntley and Harry Hepple.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

So, of course, are Jerry Herman’s insistently memorable songs, with their easily absorbed lyrics filled with their own clever wit and occasional grit. The act one curtain song “Before the Parade Passes By” highlights both the show’s sense of spectacle but also its underlying theme about not letting life pass you by.

This is integrated musical theatre craft at its best. And that sense of craft also extends to the best ensemble cast currently assembled on any London stage. No one puts a foot – or emotion – wrong, from the teeming chorus of townsfolk and waiters, to the richly comic turn of Andy Nyman, as Horace Vandergelder, the Scrooge-like owner of a feed and hay shop in upstate Yonkers whom Dolly has her ambitions set on.

There’s delightful work, too, from Harry Hepple and Tyrone Huntley as Horace’s two shop assistants, who at 33 and 17 respectively crave kissing a girl for the first time and seeing a stuffed whale in New York: yes, it’s those kind innocent pleasures that make the show glow with pleasure. As does the always estimable Jenna Russell, who makes another frustrated widow Irene Molloy a person of anxiously unresolved needs. She, too, wants another shot at life.

The show is its own brilliant affirmation of life itself. There isn’t a more enjoyable musical revival in town right now. And I strongly suspect it could become an annual summer fixture here, much like A Christmas Carol is at the Old Vic, or the panto here has proved to be.