Saddleback CLO Extends a ‘Hello’ That Could Use a Bit of Dolly-ing Up

“Hello, Dolly!,” Jerry Herman’s stentorian musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker,” has all but obscured the original play, and it’s a shame. Wilder’s gentle comedy is charming. “Dolly” is charming too but requires a sparkling staging to bring it to life.

This revival by Saddleback Civic Light Opera glows, but it doesn’t sparkle. Most of its light comes from Lee Kreter’s exuberant musical direction, for Kreter really knows how to make his orchestra sound like a Broadway pit band, with cheeky bravado and electric rhythms.

Director Jeff Paul doesn’t keep all of his company up to that mark, though, and some of his staging looks cumbersome on the Mission Viejo campus theater’s large stage with an ensemble way too small to fill it.

The main attraction in any production, of course, is Dolly, a role that looks deceptively easy. The fine comic talents of Ruth Gordon (in the original version, called “The Merchant of Yonkers”) and Shirley Booth (in “The Matchmaker”) are theater legend, and numerous Dollys in this musical version have made the show their own.

Yet Saddlebck’s Dolly, Beth Hansen--despite her estimable talents--shows that it might not be her role. Her performance looks by the numbers, with energy but little wallop, with charm but few of the boisterous explosions of gritty pizzazz that are Dolly’s calling card.

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Paul has surrounded Hansen with a worthy supporting cast, particularly buoyant firecracker performances from John Bisom as Cornelius and Cameron A. Henderson as Barnaby, the clerks who close up their employer’s Yonkers feed store to have a fling in Manhattan.

Armando Duran is excellent as shop owner Horace Vandergelder, Dolly’s matrimonial target, though his bemused good humor sometimes seems at odds with Vandergelder’s irascibility.

Julie Gunner is a delightfully laid-back Irene Molloy, the milliner Dolly has supposedly promised Vandergelder. She’s vocally impressive but pales slightly next to Karen Nowicki’s Minnie Fay. Nowicki lights up the stage with fine comic timing and know-how.

Both Noelle Bird, as Vandergelder’s sobbing daughter, and Lynn Steinhurst, as the twittering Ernestina, another of Dolly’s matrimonial red-herrings, are a little overdone, even for a Jerry Herman show. Christopher Spencer would make more of an impression as Rudolph, the maitre d’ who welcomes Dolly back where she belongs, but he plays it as a Nazi caricature (rather than a more proper and gentle Bavarian delivery) that makes one wonder why Dolly is so happy to be back under his thrall.

BE THERE

“Hello Dolly!” plays at Saddleback College’s McKinney Theatre, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Ends July 19. (949) 582-4656. Tickets are $21.