Hello, Dolly! opened on Broadway on January 16, 1964 and played there for a then-record 2,844 performances. When it finally closed two days after Christmas in 1970, a lot of theater reporters doubted that any musical would ever best that number. Wrong! The Phantom of the Opera, the revival of Chicago, The Lion King, Cats, Wicked, Les Misérables, A Chorus Line, the revival of Oh! Calcutta!, Mamma Mia!, Beauty and the Beast, Rent, Jersey Boys, The Book of Mormon, Miss Saigon, 42nd Street, Grease and Fiddler on the Roof all did it…and some of those are still running. In fact, Phantom of the Opera has now had more than four-and-a-half times as many performances as Hello, Dolly!
But Dolly! was still a triumph and it lasted as long as it did because its producer, the infamous David Merrick, kept bringing in Big Star Names for the lead when the first Dolly Levi, Carol Channing, left the show. They included — not in this order — Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller, Betty Grable, Mary Martin, Martha Raye, Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman. (And here's something I didn't know until I just looked up that list: One of the actors who played the male lead of Horace Vandergelder for a while was Richard Deacon. That's right — Mel Cooley on Broadway!)
The casting of Pearl Bailey was heralded as an especially shrewd bit of stunt casting because they restaged the show with black actors including Cab Calloway as Horace. Here, from a 1967 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, is a number from that production…