The 1964 original made a star of Carol Channing (above), with David Burns.
Bette Midler, back on Broadway again, is everyone’s choice for a future revival of “Hello, Dolly!” The 1964 original made a star of Carol Channing (inset left), with David Burns. (
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Hello, Bette!
Although the Tony nominators gave her a poke in the eye, most of Broadway loves Bette Midler in “I’ll Eat You Last” and is delighted she’s back on the legitimate stage after an absence of 35 years.
So what should she do next?
The Nederlanders, who own several Broadway theaters, have long wanted her to star in a revival of Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly!”
And they aren’t the only ones.
On a recent installment of “Theater Talk,” which I co-host on Channel 13/WNET, Peter Marks, the influential drama critic for the Washington Post, also suggested Bette “put on her Sunday clothes” and take a stab at the role that made Carol Channing famous in 1964.
“Wouldn’t you love to see her do ‘Hello, Dolly!’ ”? Marks asked his colleagues, Ben Brantley of the Times and Joan Rivers of the Beverly Hills Courier (yes — the Joan Rivers).
“Yes! In a hot minute!” Rivers said.
“That would be fabulous,” Brantley added.
“And it would sell like crazy,” Marks said. “I just saw it in Washington, and it’s a tight show. It’s a lot better than your memory of it being a sort of schlocky show. And she would bring something completely different to it.”
Now let me see.
The Nederlanders are willing to put up the money and give her a theater. And three of the most powerful critics on the planet — Joan’s readers in Beverly Hills pay premium prices! — are on the record enthusiastically endorsing the idea.
Sounds to me like something she should consider.
“Sure — it would be great, but good luck getting her,” says a veteran Broadway producer. The Nederlanders have approached her a number of times in the past, but she’s always turned them down.
She didn’t, I’m told, want to return to Broadway and have to carry a $12 million revival on her back. “That would be work,” an insider says. “And she’d have to negotiate the staircase.”
But now that she’s got her feet wet with “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” a fun but slight play, sources say she’s ready to tackle something more ambitious the next time out.
And consider this: If the revival’s halfway decent, there’s no way she’d go home without a Tony nomination.
Who would dare snub the Divine Miss M in a musical?
So think it through, Bette, and give me a call when you’ve decided. I’ll make the announcement.
A Broadway snapshot: Nathan Lane scurrying down Sixth Avenue with a wrap from Cafe Europa on his way to the Lyceum Theatre, where he’s starring in “The Nance.”
We practically bumped into each other.
Nathan: “I was just talking about you with a reporter. She told me you said to say hello. Since when did we become friends?”
Me: “I was just talking about you on a panel of reporters who were predicting the Tony Awards. Everybody thinks you’re terrific in the show. But we think Tom Hanks is going to win.”
Nathan: “Yeah — you and the rest of the tri-state area.”
Iran into Lee Grant, one of my favorite actresses of all time, lunching at Michael’s the other day with her literary agent, David Kuhn. (Full disclosure: He’s my agent, too.) Grant is putting the finishing touches on her memoir. It will cover her early years in New York studying with Sanford Meisner at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse; her work on Broadway and in the movies; and, of course, her blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, when she refused to testify against her husband, writer Arnold Manoff.
I hope she writes about working with Peter Falk on a very early (1971) “Columbo” TV movie called “Ransom for a Dead Man.”
Grant, gorgeous as ever, plays a brilliant tort lawyer who kills her boring husband and then makes the murder look like a kidnapping. The cat-and-mouse game she plays with Falk, her old acting pal from the Neighborhood Playhouse, is delicious. The movie is on the DVD, “Columbo: The First Season.”
Enjoy!