Frontmezzjunkies reports: Transport Group Presents HELLO, DOLLY!
ONE NIGHT ONLY MONDAY, JUNE 23, 8 P.M. AT CARNEGIE HALL
Transport Group (Jack Cummings III, Artistic Director & Co-Founder; Denise Dickens, Executive Director) has announced that Hello, Dolly!, featuring an all-star cast of Tony Award winners and nominees, will be the eleventh presentation in the company’s Anne L. Bernstein Concert Series—for one night only—on Monday, June 23, at 8:00 p.m. at Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall. Hello, Dolly! will be directed by Transport Group Artistic Director and five-time Drama Desk Award nominee and two-time Obie Award winner Jack Cummings III (Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke at the CSC), with musical direction by Joey Chancey. Hannah Oren serves as creative producer, and Merri Sugarman, CSA, serves as casting director. The evening is the creative team’s return to Carnegie Hall after last summer’s sold-out benefit performance of Follies In Concert.
Hello, Dolly!, book by Michael Stewart, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, based on the play The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, original production directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, produced for the Broadway stage by David Merrick and Champion Five, Inc., premiered on Broadway on January 16, 1964 at the St. James Theatre, and would make a bona fide Broadway star of its leading lady Carol Channing. The winner of ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical (a record at the time) as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical, would go on to break the record as the longest-running Broadway musical and would be revived on Broadway four times. Numerous notable actresses would take on the role of Dolly Gallagher-Levi including Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller, and Ethel Merman, during its initial record-breaking run, as well as Mary Martin, Carole Cook, Dorothy Lamour, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, Michele Lee, Edie Adams, and Yvonne De Carlo on tour, as well as countless others in foreign and regional productions. Bette Midler starred in an acclaimed Tony-winning Broadway revival in 2017, and Pearl Bailey headed a Broadway revival in 1975. Channing herself would play the role more than 5,000 times, both on Broadway in three separate productions as well as in national and international tours.
Transport Group’s concert includes Kate Baldwin (two-time Tony nominee, Hello, Dolly!, Finian’s Rainbow), Nikki Renée Daniels (Once Upon a Mattress, Company), Hannah Elless (Bright Star, Benny & Joon), Andrew Barth Feldman (Dear Evan Hansen, We Had a World), Katie Finneran (two-time Tony winner, Promises, Promises, The Thanksgiving Play), Jessica Fontana (Cinderella,TG’s Once Upon a Mattress), Santino Fontana (Tony winner, Tootsie, CSC’s I Can Get It For You Wholesale), J. Harrison Ghee (Tony winner, Some Like it Hot, Kinky Boots), Ann Harada (“Schmigadoon“, Encores’ Into The Woods), Erika Henningsen (Just In Time, Mean Girls), Grey Henson (Tony nominee, Shucked, Elf), Ashley D. Kelley (Lucille Lortel nominee, Shucked, Bella: An American Tale), Beth Leavel (Tony winner, The Drowsy Chaperone, The Prom), Kecia Lewis (Tony winner, Hell’s Kitchen, Once On This Island), Marilyn Maye (Grammy nominee, Meet Marvelous Marilyn Maye), Jak Malone (Tony nominee, Operation Mincemeat), Zachary Noah Piser (Drama Desk nominee, Redwood, KPOP), Thom Sesma (Drama Desk nominee, Dead Outlaw, Pacific Overtures), Helen J. Shen (Drama Desk nominee, Maybe Happy Ending, Teeth), A.J. Shively (Tony nominee, Paradise Square, La Cage aux Folles), Christopher Sieber (two-time Tony nominee, Death Becomes Her, Spamalot), Robert Preston Smith (Hello, Dolly!, Peter Pan), Ephraim Sykes (Tony nominee, Ain’t Too Proud, Our Town), Barbara Walsh (Tony nominee, Falsettos, Company), Natasha Yvette Williams (Tony nominee, Some Like It Hot, Waitress), Samantha Williams (Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Caroline, or Change), Alysha Umphress (On the Town, American Idiot), Jessica Vosk (Hell’s Kitchen, Wicked), and Anna Zavelson (The Notebook, Encores’ The Light in the Piazza).
The evening will be hosted by Tony nominee Lee Roy Reams. It was also recently announced that Spectrum News NY1’s Frank Dilella will join Reams to co-host the company’s one-night-only concert. Tony nominee Gracie Lawrence, currently performing in Just In Time, joins the evening’s cast to perform a song written for Barbra Streisand and the 1969 film, part of the evening’s expanded song list. Cheryl Stern (Funny Girl) also joins the lineup.
The evening will feature a selection of Gower Champion’s original choreography restaged by the choreographer and the 1995 Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! cast member Randy Slovacek, as well as a 30-piece orchestra.
Hello, Dolly! includes the classic songs “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” “Before the Parade Passes By,” “It Only Takes a Moment,” and, of course, the title song, which was a Billboard #1 hit for Louis Armstrong and earned the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. Both Armstrong’s album, Hello, Dolly!, and the original Broadway cast recording hit #1 on the Billboard album chart—and both Armstrong’s recording of the song and the original Broadway cast recording would be inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
This unique concert series features a different lineup of performers for each song, rather than a role portrayed by one actor for the entire evening. Additionally, instead of the musical’s book scenes, backstage stories and anecdotes from the creation of the original production are woven between songs.
The evening’s host, Lee Roy Reams, is a Tony and Drama Desk nominee who starred as Cornelius Hackl in the 1978 revival of Hello, Dolly! alongside Carol Channing. He directed, choreographed, and co-starred in the 1998 Broadway revue An Evening with Jerry Herman. Reams appeared in the original companies of numerous Broadway musicals, including Sweet Charity, Applause, and 42nd Street, and he directed the 1995 revival of Hello, Dolly!, also starring Carol Channing.
Previous presentations in Transport Group’s Anne L. Bernstein concert series include last year’s sold-out Follies (presented at Carnegie Hall), Nine, Rodgers & Hammerstein: A Broadway Celebration; Sweet Charity; Promises, Promises; Man of La Mancha; Baby; Once Upon a Mattress; The Music Man; Peter Pan; and A Man of No Importance.
Transport Group, an Off-Broadway theatre company, co-founded in 2001 by Jack Cummings III and Robyn Hussa, is currently run by Cummings as Artistic Director and Executive Director Denise Dickens. Transport Group crafts risk-taking, thoughtful, acclaimed productions of plays and musicals that widen the lens on our American experience. Transport Group creates unexpected theatrical experiences that allow audiences and artists to collaboratively explore the “American identity.” Transport Group has produced 37 productions: 16 new works and 21 revivals; including 14 world premieres, 3 New York premieres, and 6 commissioned works. The company has received a special New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, three Drama Desk Awards, including a special one “for its breadth of vision and its presentation of challenging productions,” nine Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, three Off-Broadway Alliance Awards, and a Dramatists Guild Award. In addition, Transport Group’s productions have received 46 Drama Desk Award nominations, eight Drama League Award nominations, four Lucille Lortel Award nominations, six Outer Critics Circle Award nominations, nine American Theatre Wing Design Award nominations, nine Off-Broadway Alliance Award nominations, four Audelco Award nominations, and a Tony Award nomination.
Transport Group’s one-night-only concert of Hello, Dolly! takes place Monday, June 23, at 8 p.m. at Carnegie Hall, 881 Seventh Avenue. Tickets, which are on sale now, start at $49 and may be purchased by phoning Carnegie Hall (212) 247-7800, visiting carnegiehall.org, or at the Carnegie Hall box office on 57 Street and Seventh Avenue. Hello, Dolly! is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals (www.concordtheatricals.com) on behalf of Tams-Witmark LLC.
