Eight years ago tonight I was at a production of Hello, Dolly! and did not see Carol Channing

August 7, 1998.  For a city its size, Syracuse had a lot of professional and semi-professional theater companies, some of them quite good.  If you'd wanted to, you could have seen a play a week all year long and enjoyed some excellent productions and great performances.   Eight years ago tonight I went to a production of Hello, Dolly by a summer stock company that had its theater on the shore of one of the Finger Lakes.  There was a reception out on the lawn after the show and as I was standing around enjoying punch and cookies a freind of mine who was the drama critic for the local alternative weekly came up and dragged me off to introduce me to some of the people who worked for the theater company.

Saw a production of Hello Dolly tonight that left me scratching my head over several things.  One is why is this show so goddamn popular?  There's hardly a plot.  The jokes are tired.  No great songs.  [Editor's note:  I don't know if I was just exhausted when I wrote this, which must have been at about 3 in the morning, or if I was just momentarily insane.  No great songs?  Before the Parade Passes By.  We've Got Elegance.  Hello, Dolly!???]  As far as I can tell the theme of the show is "Everybody should be content with one adventure in life, and an adventure is something that causes you mild anxiety, gets you laid, ends with a nice meal, and doesn't seriously change the course of your life---at the end of it you can settle down to a happy, fat, middle-class conventional existence and never think of going to New York again."  Maybe I just answered the question.

Jim M. introduced me to the actress who played Dolly.  She's a forty something blonde playing her first lead after a career of character types.  Saw her last year as the mayor's bossy wife in The Music Man.  Before that I think she was a spinster secretary in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  Tonight she was as happy an actress as she's ever been.  Her head is also turned.  Suddenly she's a diva.

She came out after the show with nine yards of cleavage leading the way, hugged everybody she could get her arms around, including Jim, who's review when he writes it tomorrow is going to be a lot less objective than it might have been, then she set about playing the part of the serious actress discussing a part objectively with us.  She reminded me why I can't stand and love actresses. Their vanity is infuriating but it's also endearing.  With a straight face she agreed with Jim, whose objectivity had been hugged right out of him, apparently, that she was actually better casting as Dolly than Carol Channing.

Jim also introduced me to the company's artistic director.  An interesting case.  He's was in New York in the early 70s, came out of there determined to export Shepherd and Brook and all that to the provinces, did time in some small town in Ohio mounting avante garde stuff in empty houses, surrendered, but never, ever forgot that running a summer stock company in upstate New York for an audience base that thinks Grease is experimental, is surrender.

He maintains his integrity by making sure that all the art that goes into putting on shows like Dolly and Sweet Charity is the point.  What he brags about, when he brags, is an interesting dance routine, a costume designer's choice of colors, a tech effect, the work done by his actors.

It's a point of pride with him that the men in his show are "big", by which he means that when he does Damn Yankees the ballplayers look like ballplayers and when he does Oklahoma the cowboys look like cowboys.  So he spends half the year on the road all over the country trying to cast his shows.  His dharma is to give work to people who deserve work.  He may be a saint.  There are a lot of actors, designers, and techies who think he is.

Comments

[Matt]

I love your notebook posts. They are an inspiration -- I've let my own go dormant.

[Likeable Friend]

I, too, enjoy your notebook posts. I really wish I'd kept a journal throughout the years. I don't remember what I did last week, but you have a way of looking back and remembering what you did and thought 10, 20 years ago. I love that.

[Jennifer]

"but never, ever forgot that running a summer stock company in upstate New York for an
audience base that thinks Grease is experimental, is surrender."

Very funny just because it is so true.

"She reminded me why I can't stand and love actresses. Their vanity is infuriating but it's also endearing."

Hmmmm, narcissism, vanity, exhibitionism... is there a theme here???

[harry near indy]

when i read your comments about the artistic director, i was reminded of something garrison keiller said during one of his lake wobegon monologues.

he mentioned a high school teacher who had just graduated from college and who wanted to direct serious theater. she gave up when the head cheerleader was cast as blanche dubois in a streetcar named desire.

after that fiasco, it was back to putting on arsenic and old lace and the man who came to dinner.