January 16, 1964—Look at the old girl now, fellas: The musical Hello, Dolly! opened at the St. James Theater, the first of 2,844 performances that would make it, for a brief period, the longest-running Broadway show of all time.
The show, with a book by Michael Stewart, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, and directed by Gower Champion, won 10 out of 11 Tony Awards for which it was nominated, not only for all the aforementioned but for actress Carol Channing, who made it one of her two signature roles (the other being Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes).
The plot of Hello, Dolly! concerns a middle-aged matchmaker whose latest job proves to be the most self-serving of her career. Assigned to find a mate for a middle-aged man with extensive requirements, she proposes candidates for his hand, all the while calculating how she can undermine their prospects while improving her own for the exact same position. In the end she succeeds, walking off with the crowning glory of her career: a rich, powerful man a little befuddled about how he got himself into this position.
I know what you’re thinking: “Hmmm…Where have I heard that before? I know—it must be from one of the following sources”:
* A one-act farce by the English John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent (1835)
* Johann Nestroy’s 1842 comedy Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, taking the same situation--a clerk in a merchant’s shop—and expanding it to a full-length play.
* Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers, which translated the action from Europe to upstate New York in the 1880s.
* Wilder’s 1954 revision of the above, The Matchmaker, starring Ruth Gordon, which benefited from director Tyrone Guthrie’s shrewd suggestion to focus on a minor character in Wilder’s original: the widow Dolly Gallagher Levi.
* The musical triumph for Channing, not only on Broadway but revived twice more, in 1978 and 1995, with the actress.
* The musical warhorse that continued on the Great White Way for another six years, with Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller and Ethel Merman succeeding Channing in the role.
* The show brought over to entertain troops in Vietnam, starring Mary Martin.
* A 1969 film version starring a much-too-young Barbra Streisand (fresh off her Funny Girl Oscar) and featuring uncharacteristically flat-footed direction from the immortal cinematic hoofer Gene Kelly.
* The 2006 Paper Mill Playhouse version, in which Tovah Feldshuh offered a radically different—but to me, certainly credible—take on the role: Dolly as a poor Irish girl out to make good and do well. (Otherwise, how did she get that name Gallagher?)
All of these are perfectly understandable sources for where you might have heard of the plot. But there’s another, more recent instance that you’re not remembering. Come on…You can do it…
Give up? Let me offer two words of help: Dick Cheney. Listen carefully:
As Cheney ends eight years that made him one of the most controversial—and surely the most powerful—Vice-President in American history, memories dim on how he won his job in the first place. It was the most unorthodox route taken by any Vice-Presidential nominee in, oh, the last three decades or so, when the norm has been not only checking potential Veep choices with a fine-tooth comb but also extensive interviews of these hopefuls by the President and his handlers.
As told in Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, Cheney took himself out of the running for the 2000 Vice-Presidential sweepstakes early when George W. Bush asked him about his willingness to take the job. Though impressing Dubya with the man’s selflessness, it was actually the kind of bat-her-eyelashes gambit at which Dolly Gallagher Levi excelled.
Then the GOP nominee, doubly awed by the vast experience of one of his dad’s Cabinet members as well as his self-effacing attitude, asked, like rich, smug Horace Vandergelder, that Cheney find him a mate—a running mate, if we must be technical. Now, Cheney’s strategy became truly Dolly-like.
As he pored over the financial and other background information provided by the 2000 Vice-Presidential hopefuls—Oklahoma Gov. Keating, Michigan Gov. John Engler, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, New York Gov. George Pataki and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth—Cheney knew every one of their weaknesses. Somehow, these became increasingly highlighted in his summaries to Bush. One by one, just like Dolly’s selections for Vandergelder, they fell by the wayside.
Finally, Dubya posed the question: would Cheney reconsider his earlier rejection of the post? Cheney went back into full-dress Dolly mode, asking if he could talk it over with his wife. Shortly thereafter, he came back with his answer, Molly Bloom-style: yes he would, yes yes yes yes….
The upshot of this was extraordinary. Unlike the men on the GOP Veep short list, Cheney did not submit to a background check, because he’d done all the sifting. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pinpointed the irony of the situation perfectly: It was like a judge at a beauty pageant picking herself as the winner!
Where did Cheney come up with this brilliant stratagem? Well, before he went in a big way for his master-of-the-political-and-business-universe role, maybe Cheney, like young men generally do, came to New York as a tourist. If he wanted to see a Broadway show in 1964, there were two musicals with diametrically opposed attitudes toward life and audience-pleasing from which he might have chosen.
On one side there was Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. True, Cheney would have had to move awfully fast to see it (it closed after nine performances, offering a preview of the cult-failure pattern that characterized most of Sondheim's subsequent career). But if he got lucky, he might have seen this show about a scheming mayor of a small town.
But God, the titles of some of those songs: “Everybody Says Don’t,” “See Where It Gets You,” “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “With So Little To Be Sure Of.” If you’re an up-and-comer from the West with eyes on getting ahead in government, does this depressing stuff sound like the way to get ahead?
On the other hand, you had the musical by Jerry Herman, who not only beat out Sondheim for the Tony for Best Score this year but, even more controversially, two decades later, when Le Cage aux Folles edged out the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park With George.
Well, with its brassy approach to problem-solving and its disdain for the existential handwringing exemplified by Sondheim, Hello, Dolly! was as guaranteed to please a Western young-man-in-a-hurry as it was Tony voters. And that plot—why, it offered as much of a blueprint to succeed as the way-to-wealth maxims memorized by another young man from west of the Mississippi, James Gatz, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Just think: This sunniest of Broadway musicals provided a template for getting one way’s way for one of DC’s reigning power brokers. Think what Herman, Wilder, Nestroy, and Oxenford—not to mention the irrepressible Miss Channing!—have to answer for!
The show, with a book by Michael Stewart, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, and directed by Gower Champion, won 10 out of 11 Tony Awards for which it was nominated, not only for all the aforementioned but for actress Carol Channing, who made it one of her two signature roles (the other being Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes).
The plot of Hello, Dolly! concerns a middle-aged matchmaker whose latest job proves to be the most self-serving of her career. Assigned to find a mate for a middle-aged man with extensive requirements, she proposes candidates for his hand, all the while calculating how she can undermine their prospects while improving her own for the exact same position. In the end she succeeds, walking off with the crowning glory of her career: a rich, powerful man a little befuddled about how he got himself into this position.
I know what you’re thinking: “Hmmm…Where have I heard that before? I know—it must be from one of the following sources”:
* A one-act farce by the English John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent (1835)
* Johann Nestroy’s 1842 comedy Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, taking the same situation--a clerk in a merchant’s shop—and expanding it to a full-length play.
* Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers, which translated the action from Europe to upstate New York in the 1880s.
* Wilder’s 1954 revision of the above, The Matchmaker, starring Ruth Gordon, which benefited from director Tyrone Guthrie’s shrewd suggestion to focus on a minor character in Wilder’s original: the widow Dolly Gallagher Levi.
* The musical triumph for Channing, not only on Broadway but revived twice more, in 1978 and 1995, with the actress.
* The musical warhorse that continued on the Great White Way for another six years, with Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller and Ethel Merman succeeding Channing in the role.
* The show brought over to entertain troops in Vietnam, starring Mary Martin.
* A 1969 film version starring a much-too-young Barbra Streisand (fresh off her Funny Girl Oscar) and featuring uncharacteristically flat-footed direction from the immortal cinematic hoofer Gene Kelly.
* The 2006 Paper Mill Playhouse version, in which Tovah Feldshuh offered a radically different—but to me, certainly credible—take on the role: Dolly as a poor Irish girl out to make good and do well. (Otherwise, how did she get that name Gallagher?)
All of these are perfectly understandable sources for where you might have heard of the plot. But there’s another, more recent instance that you’re not remembering. Come on…You can do it…
Give up? Let me offer two words of help: Dick Cheney. Listen carefully:
As Cheney ends eight years that made him one of the most controversial—and surely the most powerful—Vice-President in American history, memories dim on how he won his job in the first place. It was the most unorthodox route taken by any Vice-Presidential nominee in, oh, the last three decades or so, when the norm has been not only checking potential Veep choices with a fine-tooth comb but also extensive interviews of these hopefuls by the President and his handlers.
As told in Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, Cheney took himself out of the running for the 2000 Vice-Presidential sweepstakes early when George W. Bush asked him about his willingness to take the job. Though impressing Dubya with the man’s selflessness, it was actually the kind of bat-her-eyelashes gambit at which Dolly Gallagher Levi excelled.
Then the GOP nominee, doubly awed by the vast experience of one of his dad’s Cabinet members as well as his self-effacing attitude, asked, like rich, smug Horace Vandergelder, that Cheney find him a mate—a running mate, if we must be technical. Now, Cheney’s strategy became truly Dolly-like.
As he pored over the financial and other background information provided by the 2000 Vice-Presidential hopefuls—Oklahoma Gov. Keating, Michigan Gov. John Engler, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, New York Gov. George Pataki and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth—Cheney knew every one of their weaknesses. Somehow, these became increasingly highlighted in his summaries to Bush. One by one, just like Dolly’s selections for Vandergelder, they fell by the wayside.
Finally, Dubya posed the question: would Cheney reconsider his earlier rejection of the post? Cheney went back into full-dress Dolly mode, asking if he could talk it over with his wife. Shortly thereafter, he came back with his answer, Molly Bloom-style: yes he would, yes yes yes yes….
The upshot of this was extraordinary. Unlike the men on the GOP Veep short list, Cheney did not submit to a background check, because he’d done all the sifting. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pinpointed the irony of the situation perfectly: It was like a judge at a beauty pageant picking herself as the winner!
Where did Cheney come up with this brilliant stratagem? Well, before he went in a big way for his master-of-the-political-and-business-universe role, maybe Cheney, like young men generally do, came to New York as a tourist. If he wanted to see a Broadway show in 1964, there were two musicals with diametrically opposed attitudes toward life and audience-pleasing from which he might have chosen.
On one side there was Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. True, Cheney would have had to move awfully fast to see it (it closed after nine performances, offering a preview of the cult-failure pattern that characterized most of Sondheim's subsequent career). But if he got lucky, he might have seen this show about a scheming mayor of a small town.
But God, the titles of some of those songs: “Everybody Says Don’t,” “See Where It Gets You,” “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “With So Little To Be Sure Of.” If you’re an up-and-comer from the West with eyes on getting ahead in government, does this depressing stuff sound like the way to get ahead?
On the other hand, you had the musical by Jerry Herman, who not only beat out Sondheim for the Tony for Best Score this year but, even more controversially, two decades later, when Le Cage aux Folles edged out the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park With George.
Well, with its brassy approach to problem-solving and its disdain for the existential handwringing exemplified by Sondheim, Hello, Dolly! was as guaranteed to please a Western young-man-in-a-hurry as it was Tony voters. And that plot—why, it offered as much of a blueprint to succeed as the way-to-wealth maxims memorized by another young man from west of the Mississippi, James Gatz, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Just think: This sunniest of Broadway musicals provided a template for getting one way’s way for one of DC’s reigning power brokers. Think what Herman, Wilder, Nestroy, and Oxenford—not to mention the irrepressible Miss Channing!—have to answer for!
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