A few years ago, I bought tickets to see the musical "Hello, Dolly!" at Rollins College theater and absent-mindedly totally forgot to attend. At the time I really kicked myself from making such a knuckleheaded move, but as it would later turn out when I did attend to a performance at that same theater, it was, shall we say, forgettable. Perhaps "Hello, Dolly!" would have been the same, which would have been tragic.
But yesterday I remembered to attend a performance of this musical held at the Steinmetz Hall of the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center in downtown Orlando done by a troupe called Encore featuring Jodi Benson, noted, among other things, as being the voice of Ariel in the Disney animated classic "The Little Mermaid."
I never heard of Jodi Benson before but she played this role with outstanding talent. I strangely got the impression that though she probably wasn't trying for it, her characterization of Dolly Levi was as if she was doing an amalgam of Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Merman, Bette Midler, and Barbra Streisand, basically all the women that played this character through the years. And for me it worked.
This show is literally about the razzmatazz and it had that in spades. The ensemble players, as well as the bumbling and lovable Cornelius and Barnaby, played fabulously by Adam Paul and Oakley Thacker respectively, we're all dressed in gay 90s pastel colors and did their jigs in true olde-fashioned hokie dokie style. And this played into the overall theme of this show: much more comedic, perhaps even vaudevillian, than depictions I'd seen before. For instance, there was a memorable scene at the conclusion of the breakout of mayhem at the Harmonia Gardens restaurant, where pretty much the entire cast is assembled before a night court judge on his stand, yet Dolly is seated at her table, stage left, with a key light on her as she's nonchalantly munching away at her dinner of turkey and dumplings, and taking her sweet time, as the judge asks "Who shall bear witness for these defendants?" and everyone on stage turns and glares at her. I don't remember this at all in previous incarnations. And let me tell you, they played it up. The whole endeavor with everyone silently staring at her as she munched away was a good 5 to 7 minutes with the audience chuckling it up heartily. A little long for me but it was cute. It's nice to see when some originality is written into productions here and there. And again, it went along with this director's no doubt leaning towards a more belly laugh performance overall.
The singing was phenomenal, not a bad one in the bunch, and Ms. Benson could really belt it, let me tell you. The acoustics are famous here in this theater, built specifically and designed with engineering and high-tech features to accentuate audio, and though they were mic'd, they needn't be, but the electronics are awesome in this theater as well and it only enhanced everything.
For the large splashy numbers, the voices of the performers on stage where accentuated by dual choirs on either side of the stage chiming in for what must have been something like 30 or 40 additional singers for an all-out, blow you out of your seat, rousing performance.
The only detraction if I had to be nitpicky, would be the fact that I wanted to purchase reasonably lesser expensive seats so I chose stage right boxes. Probably won't do this at this theater again since my acrophobia was definitely peaked since the seats are right on the knee-high balcony edge three stories up. Plus at this angle, we really had to crane our heads forward to see the whole stage.
But overall, once again, another fine performance here at the Dr. Phillips Center. I guess it's worth the cost and the drive up to Orlando. I'm sure glad I didn't forget about this performance.