Theater Review : ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Lookin’ Swell in Revival

Before Andrew Lloyd Webber and rock ‘n’ roll changed the musical theater forever, “Hello, Dolly!” gave splashy, vaudeville-inspired Broadway shows their last hurrah.

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The giddy new revival by Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities is very much alive with music and farce. And yet, as Jerry Herman’s fabled show celebrates its 30th anniversary, its role as a coda to the great American musicals of the ‘40s and ‘50s becomes clear. To see it now is to be reminded how naively optimistic we once were--or, if you prefer, how jaded and cynical we have become.

Fortunately, the folks in Redondo Beach, “dedicated to the preservation of our American cultural heritage,” have preserved this slice of cultural heritage with both faith and absolute sincerity, reminding us that even seemingly precious art can still thrill provided it is guilelessly presented.

The bright ensemble, which turns each of director-choreographer Jon Engstrom’s numbers into a kind of loud and lovely cast party, is reason enough to see this “Dolly,” and even to overlook some lapses in singing and acting among the leading supporting players. Yet there are at least two more reasons--not including the acrobatic waiters at the show’s swank Harmonia Gardens restaurant.

One is Karen Morrow, the veteran Broadway actress, in the title role of the meddlesome middle-aged matchmaker who enlivens 1890s Yonkers. A number of fine comic actresses have inhabited this part over the years (a national tour with Carol Channing is currently making the rounds), yet Morrow gives it her own spin. Hers is a devilish Dolly, self-aware and conniving yet wise and funny.

She can also belt out a song and grandstand a comedy bit with the best of ‘em. When she attempts to distract her romantic foil, rich feed merchant Horace Vandergelder (the lovably grumpy Jack Ritschel), by cooing over his “rip-rippling muscles,” Morrow turns the feint into a silly, totally unerotic gag at Vandergelder’s expense.

Morrow has a lot to do with the other reason as well. For this version, composer Herman has restored “Love, Look in My Window,” a dreamy, wistful ballad included in the score for Ethel Merman but left out since. Supercharged by Morrow’s powerful set of lungs, the piece makes a fitting companion, musically and thematically, to the Act I finale “Before the Parade Passes By,” a brassy echo of “76 Trombones” from “The Music Man.”

Shirley Anne Harrison, who plays the widowed milliner Molloy, struggles a bit with the vocal demands of the part, and two minor roles--Molloy’s apprentice Minnie Fay (Shauna Markey) and Vandergelder’s grown daughter (Michele Amiee Moore --are overplayed as cloyingly perky and cloyingly infantile, respectively. Timothy Smith, playing Vandergelder’s mousy clerk Cornelius, has a beautiful, bell-clear tenor, though, and it’s put to good use throughout.

With revivals like this one still around, the parade will never completely pass by Herman’s last of the Broadway legends.

* “Hello, Dolly!,” Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, Manhattan Beach and Aviation boulevards, Redondo Beach. Tuesdays-Saturdays,8 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 25. $20-35. (310) 372-4477. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.