by Jake Stigers
Dolly Levi’s meddling, matchmaking story in Hello, Dolly! has origins so old that they predate the Victorian Era by two years: The 1964 musical was inspired by the 1955 play The Matchmaker, which was in turn inspired by the 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. Both were written by Thornton Wilder, who is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-winning play Our Town.
But Dolly’s genealogy doesn’t stop there. Wilder took his ideas from a play written almost a century earlier: the 1842 mega-titled Einen Jux will er sich machen (He Will Go on a Spree or He'll Have Himself a Good Time), which found Dolly’s original inspiration in A Day Well Spent, an English one-act written in 1835.
Though the Dolly we know and love today didn’t arrive fully formed at the dawn of this literary journey, her universally relatable joy, optimism, determination—and perhaps her employment of a little manipulation in the pursuit of love—have kept her in our hearts for 55 years … and have given her a Billboard-topping cast album, Oscar-winning movie and now four Broadway revivals along the way.
Hello, Dolly! was originally written for the brassy Broadway beltress Ethel Merman, who turned it down but six years later took over the role and played Dolly until the show closed in 1970. Mary Martin—star of South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music—also turned down Dolly and then ended up playing her in London.
So it fell to Carol Channing, a lesser-known veteran of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town, to bring our Dolly Gallagher Levi to life through Jerry Herman’s glorious music, Gower Champion’s direction (also not a first choice; he got the job after Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins turned it down), and what would become an iconic jewel-drenched red dress and matching feathered halo. The show ended up railroading past Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl that season to win a whopping 10 Tony Awards, a tie with 1949’s South Pacific that wouldn’t be broken until The Producers racked up 12 Tony Awards 37 years later.
The original Broadway production ran six years and 2,844 performances and saw its first revival—with an all-black cast led by Pearl Bailey—only five years after it closed. Dolly has been played by a pantheon of stars since then including Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Yvonne De Carlo, Betty White, Bernadette Peters, and (of course) Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. And she’s clearly listened to her eponymous song, because she doesn’t ever go away … and clearly nobody wants her to.
From her humble, generations-old origins to her enduring blockbuster musical, which was originally titled—and I am not making this up—Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman, Dolly Gallagher Levi looks to continue bringing hearts together and audiences to their feet for generations to come.
It’s worth noting that Thornton Wilder loved Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! so much that he promised to rewrite his Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth for her so she could play both female leads. He died before he finished the rewrite, but you as Theatre Cedar Rapids audience members will soon have the opportunity to see The Skin of Our Teeth in its original form in our downstairs Grandon Theatre. It runs April 3-19, 2020, so please don’t go away until you’ve gotten your tickets.
