After the tornado, the rainbow.
If Bette Midler’s Dolly Gallagher Levi was a dizzying whirlwind of bite and bluster, Bernadette Peters’s is a gentler event, one of endearingly zany charms and touching warmth. She’s the polish on Midler’s brass.
And as the new crooning busybody of director Jerry Zaks’s bubbly revival – a show-tune machine that now purrs like an impeccably-maintained Cadillac – she arrives at the Shubert Theatre to spread further the old-school joys of songwriter Jerry Herman and book writer Michael Stewart’s handiwork. Indeed, Peters-as-Dolly feels like the keeping of one of Broadway’s sacred promises.
For a certain caliber of musical theater star, Dolly is a rightful inheritance, an essential turn in the spotlight predestined over the years for the likes of Carol Channing and Pearl Bailey and Mary Martin and Ethel Merman and now, for Midler and Donna Murphy and Peters and Betty Buckley (who’ll play her in the national tour).
That splendid Herman lyric “… so nice to have you back where you belong …” raises fresh lumps in the throat each time one of these great dames descends that Harmonia Gardens staircase. And of course, they’re raised again when Peters materializes at the top of the stairs in that smashing red gown and crown of red feathers by Santo Loquasto. (Where, by the way, does Dolly get these amazing dresses?)
In any event, at the top is exactly where Peters belongs.
In tandem, too, with the indispensable Victor Garber, who takes over the role of Dolly marriage target and comic foil Horace Vandergelder from David Hyde Pierce, Peters’s performance propels the character in a more adorable, embraceable direction. Midler was outrageously clownish and her Dolly an expression of independence and flamboyant impulse. After each of the confidences she shares with her beloved dead husband Ephraim, about her plan to hook Vandergelder, you could easily have imagined Midler’s Dolly turning to the orchestra and bellowing: “Horace, Schmorace. Maestro, give me a C!”