Hello, Dolly!
 In showbiz as in life, older women complain of feeling ‘invisible’. Happily, that's not a problem at the Palladium, where – ‘wow, wow, wow, fellas, look at the old girl now, fellas!’ - Imelda Staunton is making herself gloriously seen and heard in Dominic Cooke's lavish revival of ‘Hello, Dolly!’. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's midlife musical romcom is a goofy love letter to Dolly, a widow who takes a train to Yonkers, fixes everyone else’s romantic problems and eventually her own. I'd say Staunton’s stronger and more age appropriate casting for Dolly than Barbra Streisand was in the 1969 movie. Petite, rosy-cheeked and indomitable, Staunton doesn't have Streisand's clarion pipes or goddessy physicality, or indeed the gorgeous jammy-voiced assistance of Louis Armstrong. But she crushes it as Dolly, making her a puckish nemesis who wreaks havoc in the boring life of Horace Vandergelder, stingy ‘half millionaire’, and oppressor of nieces and clerks. Staunton is a consummate actress who can also sing, not the other way around. The farcical, goofy storyline bustles and hustles constantly, but Staunton cuts through the noise, not with front and brass but with touching subtlety and emotional depth. Cooke's show is a big old-fashioned bells and whistles production with impressive hoofing choreography and the rare pleasure of a real orchestra. It needs to be to fill the iconic London Palladium and justify the New York prices. It is a bit flat in the first half hour, Vanderge