My old pal Pat O'Neill wrote me with this…
After your comment about actresses playing Dolly when they're too young, I wondered: Just how old do you think Dolly is supposed to be?
For the record, Carol Channing was 43 when she played Dolly for the first time in 1964. Mary Martin was 52 when she starred in the London production the next year. Pearl Bailey was 57 when she was in the all-black cast in '75. Tovah Feldshuh was 54 when she did it in 2006. Bette Midler was 66 when she did it in 2017. Betty Buckley was 70 during the national tour in 2018. The casting for the role has gotten consistently older over the past 50 years.
In 1955, in the original run of The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, Dolly was played by Ruth Gordon, who was then 59. Shirley Booth starred in the film version at the age of 60. I've always thought of her as being young middle-aged, 45-60 at most. Someday I want to direct a community theater production of Wilder's play.
As I recall when this question was raised years ago on some theater chatboard, the answers went like this: "Well, I loved Barbra Streisand in the movie so Dolly should be whatever age Barbra was when the film was made." Or "Well, I loved Carol Channing on the stage so Dolly should be whatever age Carol was when I saw it," etc. Keying it to when you saw Carol do it would give you a wide range of ages spanning several decades because I think she played the role here and there for something like forty years.
And I would imagine the answer, if you asked anyone who was producing a production of it, would be: "Dolly should be the age of the actress I can hire who is most likely to sell tickets." And it just dawned on me I should have started this post with one of these…
If you want to just look at the story, Thornton Wilder in the script of The Matchmaker said that Dolly was of "uncertain age," which might mean Wilder wanted her to be of the age where women don't like their ages divulged…or he could have been thinking like a producer: Who's Box Office? But 59-60 (Ruth Gordon and Shirley Booth) seem about right to me. Of course, we're talking about if the actress is believable on stage or screen playing someone that age, not how old the actress really was at the time.
I don't think Barbra played someone who was over fifty when she made Hello, Dolly. She could do it now but I don't think anyone's going to go to the trouble of having her redo her scenes today in front of a green screen and editing the present-day Barbra into it.
I also don't think it hurt that movie as much as the overblown production values, the lack of any rapport between her and Walter Matthau or the fact that it's really a very small, silly story. (I dunno if I ever mentioned it here but the one time I got to spend some time with Gene Kelly, who directed the film, I asked him what the most difficult part of it was. He replied, in a manner that suggested he'd used this line many times before, "Deciding whether to strangle Barbra Streisand and then Walter Matthau or Matthau first and then Streisand.")
But if you look at the script itself — what she says and what she does and what others say about her — there are two indicators. One is that the most important moment in the whole show is the musical number when she returns after a long absence to the Harmonia Gardens and the staff is so excited to have her back where she belongs.
Harmonia Gardens is not the kind of place where kids go so she had to have at least been in her twenties when she frequented the place. And her absence has to have been long enough that it's an event that has the waiters doing somersaults and backflips that she's returned. So that would suggest she's in her thirties or forties.
Meanwhile, the main story point about Dolly Levi is that she was married for a long enough time that she felt married forever. Then when her husband died, she had a hard time rejoining the world and opening herself up to the concept that her life was not over and that she might ever love again. That sounds to me older than her thirties and probably older than her forties. Many of the on-stage Dollies I've seen did not strike me as looking that age even if they were.
So that's my view. Oddly enough, I once discussed the casting of Streisand not only with Gene Kelly but with Ernie Lehman, who produced the movie, wrote the screenplay and who was the person who actually decided on Barbra. He said he thought picking her was a mistake on his part not because of her age but because of that lack of Chemistry with Horace Vandergelder (Matthau) that I mentioned and mainly for this reason: Streisand was and is the kind of performer who is always the lead in everything she does.
She is not a supporting player and in Hello, Dolly — despite the name of the play/movie — Dolly is almost a supporting role. The story spends at least as much time on those childish ribbon clerk characters. If you were a Barbra Streisand fan going to see a Barbra Streisand movie, you could feel very cheated by having to sit through all those scenes that she isn't in. I mentioned this once to a friend who loves Barbra and the film and he agreed but said he just fast-forwards through all of that. I don't think you can do that when you're watching with a crowd in a movie theater…though I wouldn't be surprised if the AMC chain is working on making that happen.
And I put the Trivia Warning Banner up because I'm well aware how unimportant all of this is…and it's Hello, Dolly we're talking about which is full of plot inconsistencies and illogical actions. It's not supposed to make strict sense. It's just something to get your mind off the real world for a while…and these days, we need all of that we can get.