5.3 Hello, Dolly!

The Gospel of Musical Theatre

She's still glowin', she's still crowin,' she's still goin' strong...

That's right: we're continuing our deep dive into the great Barbra Streisand with a look at the mid-60s Broadway classic, Jerry Herman’s Hello Dolly!

We talk about:

• Discernment: Dolly is a woman on a journey out of grief – and is looking for her sign. What kind of a theology of discernment does the show depend on?
• Gender: We take a close look at Horace’s song about marriage, “It Takes A Woman” and dig a little bit underneath the surface of the show’s fun to pull apart the class and economics of male-female relationships.
• Clothes: So much of Hello Dolly is about the clothes – the actual costumes the actors are wearing, and the show’s deeper fixation on the performative nature of class, gender and race.
• Restaurants: What does it mean that Dolly comes back home where she belongs? Is this the show’s resurrection moment?
• Moments: Falling in love, Kairos time, moments of divinity and resurrection and where they find us – in church, in the theatre, in the eyes of a beloved.

You’ll hear:

The 1969 film soundtrack: La Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Louis Armstrong and the full cast singing “Just Leave Everything To Me,” “It Takes a Woman,” “Ribbons Down My Back,” “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” “Elegance,” “Before the Parade Passes By,” “It Only Takes a Moment” and, of course, “Hello, Dolly!”

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