A fair-sized audience sat through Hello, Dolly! in a constant drizzle of rain last night in Regent’s Park, but the actors only left the stage for ten minutes in the first act while the stage management team mopped up the surface damp.

Anyone who saw Carole Channing in the role will be surprised by Samantha Spiro’s guileful, snappy performance as Dolly Levi; she’s not all that loud, she’s funny and she’s not remotely bonkers.

Spiro may not sing as well (who could?) as Barbra Streisand in the movie, but she’s far more plausible as the merry meddling little widow who animates a day trip from Yonkers to Manhattan with her infectious love of dancing and show tunes.

What I most love about Timothy Sheader’s production is its neatness and elegance. Equal credit to choreographer Stephen Mear whose work here is every bit as good as on last season’s Gigi. The galloping waiters in their red jackets are a corporate treat.

And Peter McKintosh has designed a wooden galleried setting that must have cost a fortune and houses the small band in a cupola above the stairways and is ingeniously adaptable to the demands of both Horace Vandergelder’s dry goods store and the Harmonia Gardens where Dolly’s back where she belongs.

The structure is an upmarket version of the Tree House Gallery headquarters just a couple of hundred yards away in the park where some high class squatters have been encamped for several weeks holding workshops, making music and generally demonstrating the outdoor good life; my friend the actress Claudia Boulton has even performed her forty-minute table top tragedy of the Oresteia.

At first, this enclave by the boating lake looks like a film set for the Swiss Family Robinson, with hammocks and carved wooden seats dotted around a collection of ramshackle-looking but beautifully carpentered tree trunk tables and tree houses.

You can climb into a circular tree house library, or visit a wonderful little exhibition of illuminated wooden huts in another tree house, or sit down and write a poem or make a drawing.

Most of the inhabitants are cashmere hippies. And one or two of them were in the nearby gents toilet cooking up the supper they can’t eat by the camp fire because of the park regulations; no-one is supposed to light a fire or sleep on the premises, though half a blind eye has been turned on the second stricture.

It’s a very surprising thing to find in the most staid and decorous of all London parks, but it’s well worth a look before the caravan moves on in ten days time. The big question now is: what happens to all the structures? They need to be dismantled and preserved in a more semi-permanent home, perhaps somewhere on Hampstead Heath?

Back in the theatre, I sense a few dangerous signs of deterioration. The bar service, even on a slow night, was far worse than it used to be, and you have to queue for slips before you queue for your coffee in the interval. This was a tiresome and difficult process, and very badly organised.

The barbecue has moved from the far end of the bar to the far side of the lawn, and you can no longer buy a big fat sausage. The burgers are not as good as they were, and the baps they come with are horrid.

And the price of everything, my dear: two just about average burgers, four tiddly glasses of nasty red wine, two coffees and a programme came out at £40. Someone needs to get a grip otherwise we’ll be decamping to the free hippie show in the tree houses round the corner, waving and singing goodbye Dolly, we must leave you. 
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 8:51 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.