Michael Crawford will never forget dancing with Barbra Streisand in the 1969 musical adaption Hello, Dolly! — or playfully clashing with her over the choreography. “Barbra said to [director] Gene Kelly, ‘He needs to go here. I’ve got to be on that side,’” the 77-year-old actor revealed to Closer Weekly in the magazine’s latest issue, on newsstands now. “I said, ‘I haven’t got enough time to get there, and you look just the same on this side.’ She said, ‘What a mouth! He looks so innocent.’ She was great — we got on very well.” Read MORE

 

Betty Buckley was the last actress Betty Buckley ever imagined playing the role of the irrepressible matchmaker Dolly Levi in the 1964 musical theater classic “Hello, Dolly!” Not only did this theatrical luminary never envision herself as a match for the character, she openly acknowledges she wasn’t a fan of the show when she saw it in college starring Pearl Bailey. As a young woman, she was smitten with the darkly sensual work of Bob Fosse, so the old-fashioned “Dolly” seemed like a relic.

“I didn’t understand why people were so happy to see this woman in these beautiful hats and costumes flouncing around the stage,” Buckley says over the phone on a week off from the show, while sitting in her car in a supermarket parking lot in Fort Worth, not far from her horse ranch. “I just didn’t understand the depth of the story by any means.” (Read MORE)

Carole Cook, the veteran actress who toured Australia as Dolly Levi, who played “everything from Medea to Mame,” returns for her twenty-fifth performance at the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation’s Help is on the Way benefit concert, August 18 at the Herbst Theatre. Read MORE

The UTEP Dinner Theatre presents the classic musical comedy “Hello Dolly!” featuring the timeless Jerry Herman score and directed by Justin Lucero who also serves as the artistic director of the El Paso Opera. Lucero previously directed the UTEP productions of “South Pacific” and “Anything Goes.”  Read MORE

Before the rock music of “Hair” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” before the ironies of Stephen Sondheim, before the bleak visions of Kander and Ebb, before the epic stagings of “Phantom” and “Les Miz,” Broadway musicals relied on at least one of three elements: hummable melodies that could be recorded by pop singers, roles where a star could bewitch the audience and a conflict-and-resolution structure dating to operettas of the 19th century.Read MORE