Ruth Leon’s Pocket Musical Theatre Reviews

Hello Dolly! – London Palladium

This is the show they don’t make ‘em like anymore. Imelda Staunton, completing her trio of big female roles – Mama Rose, Mrs. Lovat and now Dolly Levi – is the centrifugal force around which this big-hearted production of Jerry Herman’s 1963 blockbuster is built.

The producers have thrown everything at it. The sets, really beautiful moving projections of a turn-of-the-last century London, and the costumes, designer Rae Smith at her candy coloured best, and the ballet-infused one-stepping choreography of Bill Deamer, is all top drawer.

What this Dolly has, courtesy of her own abilities and those of Director Dominic Cooke, is a heart. Her heart beats for her late husband, Ephraim, and for her own life “before the parade passes by” and she has made her widowhood into a succession of services which she provides to others to keep herself from the loneliness which she lets us see so touchingly in the pauses between songs. There are several moments when the dancers and singers are exploding with Jerry Herman’s great songs and filling the stage with activity, when Dolly stands quietly and sadly alone and that’s just when an actor of Staunton’s calibre shines.

On the minus side, she’s little, and next to all those tall chorus dancers she sometimes almost disappears, most crucially in her big number, the title song, which belongs to Dolly but where Staunton, despite her gorgeous over-the-top emerald green dress, seems too small for the moment. Also, she can’t dance. Deamer cleverly moves the dancers around her to give the impression that she’s dancing but this is a very dance-y show and it shows.

But the others can dance and sing too. Andy Nyman is a fine Horace Vandergelder and Jenna Russell’s Mrs Malloy shines. The chorus and supporting cast are just what you need from a big Broadway musical, well honed and rehearsed to a whisker.

Imelda Staunton is not Carol Channing, nor yet Bette Middler, two outsize performers who made Dolly their own as the enormous character she is meant to be. But she acts better than either of them, sings those famous songs so well, and she’s so nice that you forgive her that this Hello Dolly! just misses being spectacular.

The Baker’s Wife – Menier Chocolate Factory

Go east from the Palladium and you’ll come to the Menier Chocolate Factory, currently presenting another vintage musical. This one, The Baker’s Wife by Stephen Schwarz, dates from 1989, adapted by Joseph Stein from a 1938 French film by Marcel Pagnol.

Nothing much happens in The Baker’s Wife. A longed-for baker (endearingly played by Clive Rowe), comes to a small French village with his new wife. They are welcomed by the villagers and settle down in their new home until Genevieve, the wife, falls in lust with a handsome rascal and runs off with him.

The rest of the show is not in doubt. Of course she will come back to her loving husband, brought back by worried villagers, and the hymn to marriage will infect others as well as the baker and his wife.
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Unlike Hello Dolly! which has scads of them, this show has only two great songs. One, Meadowlark, is a classic of the cabaret and audition circuit. Covered by everyone from Patti Lupone to Sarah Brightman, I guarantee that you’d know this song if you heard it. In this production it is sung, indifferently well, by Lucie Jones in the title role. The other great song is simply called Chanson and it’s sung very well indeed, several times, by Josefina Gabrielle in a minor role as the local café owner’s wife.

The best way to describe The Baker’s Wife is that it’s charming. The audience gets to play boules before the show with the cast, and the set suggests a French village without going over the top. It’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend an evening but nobody would accuse it of being Hello Dolly!

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