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 both 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.
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,
Hello, Dolly! | theatrecr.org
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 this April.
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.
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