Hello, Dolly

Full disclosure: I find Dolly Levi, professional meddler, hard to love. Perhaps it's her infernal, if well meant, busybodying: she's the Mary Poppins of matchmakers, able to pull a six-foot husband out of a carpetbag, but unlike Poppins she never makes it look easy. Is there anything more irritating than a know-all who obliges you to see exactly how hard-won her knowledge is?

It's turn-of-the-last-century New York, and Dolly (Samantha Spiro) has set up Horace, 'the well known half-a-millionaire', with milliner Irene Molloy. But this won't be a smooth transaction: Horace's overworked clerks are on their way into town, also looking for love, and anyway, Dolly has decided that Horace is the man for her. If he weren't such a misery-guts you could almost feel sorry for him.

The best thing about this show is the business: Stephen Mears's terrific choreography, Peter McKintosh's inventive set. The costumes, like the choruses, blaze with joie de vivre, and the clerks and their beloveds are charming; Josefina Gabrielle, as Irene, has both the voice and the comic chops required for the role of a milliner who hates hats.
Spiro and Allan Corduner as her putative lover are less convincing, but then their roles are impossible. He's a penny-pinching SOB; she's tired of earning a living. He wants a cleaner, she wants to clean him out. Everyone's obeying the economic imperative, which may be accurate for the era but turns a musical into a business transaction. It's a problem all the songs in the book can't solve.