Sally Struthers Stars in Hello, Dolly!

For sheer exuberance, there’s not much that can rival the title number in Jerry Herman’s classic Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! Through the magic of Gower Champion’s choreography, the relentless buildup of the star’s call and response with the staff at the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant takes on a fearsome momentum. Beginning as a simple playful list — “You’re looking swell, Manny,” etc. — the scene goes on to contain everything from knee slapping to a kick line and acrobatics. There’s room for an entire rainbow of emotions in this song, too, from the sunniest innocent yellows and pinks to the most salacious purples and even some of the truest blues. What does it take to carry it off? There have been so many great Dollys, from Ethel Merman and Carol Channing to Pearl Bailey, but what do they all have in common? The answer will be easy to see when Sally Struthers takes the Granada Theatre stage this week and shows that to triumph as Dolly, you’ve got to have the charisma of a Broadway star and the imagination of a comic actress.

When I caught up with Struthers by phone recently, she was in Spokane and had just walked over a mile in the snow, but she was upbeat and cheerful as she pored over the details and the history of a show she clearly loves very much. “I first saw Hello, Dolly! with Pearl Bailey,” Struthers recalled. “It was a historic production and an all-black cast. … What I like about this production is the feeling of being at the helm of a big and talented young group,” Struthers said, adding that “the youngest female member of the cast is 19, but she looks 15, and the youngest male is 23, but he looks 17.” Speaking of the scale of this nationally touring production, Struthers said that “including the crew and the drivers, we are on the road with 54 people. It’s a great way to see America.”

Asked about the tour’s reception, Struthers said that although the show “gets a roaring standing ovation every night,” there are big differences between the audiences. “Some audiences you can hear, so that you know when it’s working, but others are quiet, and I want to tell them, ‘We can’t hear you smiling.’” Struthers again emphasized the excitement of traveling across America in this most American of musicals and “meeting people and making friends in every state.”