Hello, Dolly! review: Palladium whoops for Imelda Staunton in role of a lifetime

Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium review: ★★★★

Plenty of musicals made in the middle of last century are given glittering revivals, but rarely do they look and feel as contemporary as Dominic Cooke’s adaptation of Hello Dolly!, this year’s most hyped musical.

Cooke plunges us into an 1890s New York so richly realised through pops of colour and set pieces that it can feel cartoonish in its eccentricities. Great trolleybuses veer onto the stage, warm colour washes pulsate like club lighting, and the fashion is out of this world. Musicals at the Palladium typically pull out all the stops, but somehow Hello, Dolly! has found new ways of raising the roof.

It’s held together by the singular charm of Imelda Staunton, welcomed by a cacophonous cheer so resonant on press night that even the octogenarian celebs filling the stalls must have heard it through their ear pieces. I can’t remember anything louder in the West End.

Read more: Dorian: The Musical review – New take on Oscar Wilde is all surface

Imelda Staunton plays Dolly Levi, a professional matchmaker seeking a wife for a cynical gentleman called Horace Vandergelder, only she likes the look of him too. Artist Ambrose has the eyes for Vandergelder’s neice Ermengarde and asks Dolly to help with the set-up. Based on the 1938 farcical play The Merchant of Yonkers by Thornton Wilder, a series of elaborate set pieces – the posh restaurant, the hat shop – enable the farce, cloaking characters in cupboards and under tablecloths.

It’s mostly as utterly heart-warming as it is funny, though not immune to criticism: Dominic Cooke’s direction is occasionally self-indulgent, and decent chunks could have been cut from both acts, particularly act 1’s ‘Dancing’ which takes itself too seriously for too long.

It’s best when it bolts along and veers away from sentimentality, and Staunton gets this: she always has a glint in her eye that shows she’s in on the joke. Oh, and she can sing! She belts the titular track in act two in a way that makes you feel perplexed as to why she hasn’t done much more of this before. She’s always seemed a kind woman in press interviews and her warm nature is the perfect match for the soft empath Dolly. Barely off stage for over two hours, Staunton is after as much fun as the audience, and always smiling in our direction in a way that is saying “this is ridiculous, isn’t it?” without actually saying it. (Her husband, the actor Jim Carter, was in tears in the stalls watching on opening night.)

More about high camp performativity than recognisable numbers, act two has the particularly ridiculous ‘The Waiters’ Gallop’, which is exactly as bizarre and wondrous as it sounds, so good that they perform it twice. Act 1’s Before the Parade Passes By competes in the barmy costume and sing-it-down-the-road ranks, and Ribbons Down My Back experiments with serious emotion if only briefly.

Elsewhere the cast, including Jenna Russell and Tyrone Huntley, shine like the New York skyline. This glistening production is the musical of the summer.

Hello, Dolly! plays at the London Palladium until 14 September

Read more: Slave Play review: Kit Harrington in uncomfortably funny racism satire