Hello, Dolly! at Asheville Community Theatre
Asheville Community Theatre is welcoming spring with the evergreen musical Hello, Dolly! It’s a color-splashed Easter basket of a production, brimming with pastels and plaids, twinkling lights and American nostalgia about courtship, marriage, and the roles of women and wives.
The director, Eli Cunningham, tells us from the get-go in a program note that we’re in for an evening of saying “yes to adventure, to each other, and to love.” He follows through on that bold promise with a big-hearted show with a big cast of 28 whose enthusiasm often seems ready to spill over the edge of the stage.
Hello, Dolly! has a surprisingly long theatrical lineage. It begins in 19th-century Austria with a popular farce by Johann Nestroy about two country grocery clerks who slip away to Vienna for a reckless day chasing romance.
Thornton Wilder, best known for Our Town, adapted that play into The Merchant of Yonkers in 1938 and later revised it as The Matchmaker in 1954. He shifted the center of gravity from the adventuring clerks to the irrepressible Dolly Gallagher Levi, a widow who meddles in everyone’s affairs.
That version inspired composer Jerry Herman and librettist Michael Stewart to create Hello, Dolly! in 1964. It became one of Broadway’s great star vehicles, indelibly linked to such divas as Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, Ginger Rogers, Barbra Streisand and, more recently, Bette Midler.
For ACT, Cunningham has assembled a crackerjack team of actors, singers, dancers, and designers who give all the show’s elements a high gloss.
Among the glossiest is Alexa Edelman as Dolly, the New York fixer who puts her hand in here and there, arranging lives for fun and profit. We meet her first in Yonkers, where she’s ostensibly arrived to arrange a marriage for the grumpy half-millionaire widower Horace Vandergelder (Chris Swartz) to Irene Malloy (Mo Mora), a New York milliner.
But Dolly has designs on Vandergelder herself, as she tells her late husband in several poignant soliloquies down center in a spotlight. After lonely nights putting out the cat and drinking a hot toddy at bedtime, she’s going to embrace life — specifically married life — again.
With a BFA in musical theatre from Syracuse University, Edelman has the vocal and dance chops, as well as the stamina to keep high energy numbers running back to back for the show’s full two hours.
She also has some sly comic timing. When she tells Vandergelder to go his way and she’ll go hers, she deftly signals she’s following him. In a running gag, she keeps reaching into her capacious handbag for a business card announcing yet another skill — Varicose veins reduced. Consultations free; Dance instructor/social coach — to sell. The gag peaks and the laughs begin when she simply starts heading to the bag.
Another standout is Mora as the hat maker Irene Molloy. Like Dolly, she’s a widow looking to get back in the marriage game. The program tells us this is Mora’s debut at ACT and her first time on stage in 14 years, but with her expressive face and her accomplished singing and dancing, it’s clear she’s been honing her craft somewhere.
Each of her numbers hits its own right note. In “Ribbons Down My Back,” it’s sweet yearning. In “Elegance,” it’s vaudeville hoofing. In the show’s climactic song “It Only Takes a Moment,” it’s genuine love light gleaming.
“It Only Takes a Moment” also lets Chandler Peveto shine as Cornelius Hackl, Vandergelder’s head clerk on the lam in New York with his young sidekick Barnaby Tucker, played with winning naivety by Colin Taylor.
For most of the show, Peveto and Taylor are a high-speed, slapstick Abbott and Costello hiding in cupboards or under tables. But when Hackl finally declares his love in song to Mrs. Molloy, he slows down to let real emotion through.
Swartz as Vandergelder plays a cartoonishly grumpy old man. He admirably goes for a Yonkers accent, which underlines the cartoon. But like Peveto, he tamps down the bluster in favor of a more genuine emotion for Vandergelder’s famous declaration of “Wonderful woman!” as he allows Dolly to ensnare him at the end.
There are many memorable moments throughout the show. Candy Macan-Egues as Vandergelder’s niece lets out a wail whenever her romance with the artist Ambrose Kemper is thwarted. (He’s played with low-key efficiency by Andy Thompson.) She caps the running gag with a final bellow that says she knows exactly what she’s doing.
And watch out for Taylor’s reaction as Barnaby when Vandergelder tells him he’s about to get a new mistress.
The energetic dance numbers have their own share of memorable moments, including splits, cartwheels, and handstands that earn audience cheers. They are choreographed with panache by Conny Andres and Elaina Zweiner, and performed with such precision you’d think the ensemble were Broadway veterans. The big second act “Hello, Dolly” number with singing/dancing waiters is the highlight it is meant to be.
Set designer Jill Summers expertly maneuvers a complex jigsaw puzzle of moving pieces on, off, and around ACT’s modest-sized stage. And lighting designer Abby Auman gives the set visual pop with borders of twinkling and chasing lights.
Costume designer Marilyn Bailey’s work is a real star of the production. Summers and Auman keep the scenic background monochromatic to let the rainbow of pastels and patterns dazzle. Bailey’s gowns for Dolly have glamor and sparkle, and her black and red scheme for the dancing waiters makes a nice contrast. She might add some corsets and more structured bustles to give all those lovely dresses a better period silhouette. And lots and lots of petticoast would give the dance numbers the right bounce.
The production is accompanied by a 12-piece orchestra, but the pleasure of their live presence is undercut by hiding them away in 35Below, ACT’s black box theatre on the ground level, behind the mainstage. The piped-in music had the same effect as a recording Here’s hoping that for future musicals ACT will put them back in full view above the stage as with The Rocky Horror Show.
The opening night audience on April 10 was boisterous with their applause and laughter. They really didn’t need Cunningham instructing them how to respond in his pre-show speech. Here’s another hope: that he will cut that out.
In the parade scene at the end of the show, the director tips his hat to the changing roles of women, and it’s clear Dolly is going to take charge of Vandergelder, her marriage, and his half-million. “Money is like manure,” she says, “it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.”
Hello, Dolly! is a bright example of ACT’s winning formula for Asheville’s musicals-loving audiences.
Hello, Dolly! runs through May 3 at Asheville Community Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit ashevilletheatre.org.
