The voice is unmistakable.
Broadway star Carol Channing is calling from California to see
how things are going in Bradford, one of the few spots in America
she’s not played.
She’s making up for that on Friday by closing the Bradford
Creative and Performing Arts’ season at 7:30 p.m. in University of
Pittsburgh at Bradford’s Bromeley Family Theater in Blaisdell Hall
with her one-woman show, “The First Eighty Years Are the Hardest,”
a musical memoir of her storied career.
“Bradford!” she says, in a tone that’s a cross between a
foghorn, a whistle and a cat. Marilyn Horne’s hometown: “we had her
little sister (Gloria) doing Irene Malloy in ‘Dolly,’ both on the
road and in New York. Her sister sang up a storm, too!”
“Dolly” of course, is the landmark 1964 Broadway musical,
“Hello, Dolly!,” that turned Channing from a mere star into a
legend.
Her portrait of the cunning matchmaker, Dolly Levi, who saves
her last client for herself, is generally considered among a
half-dozen indelible performances in the history of American
musical theater, along with Yul Brenner in “The King and I,” Ethel
Merman in ‘”Gypsy,” Zero Mostel in “Fiddler on the Roof,” and maybe
one or two others.
In that show, Channing pulled off what might be the single
biggest showstopper among her elite group of Broadway immortals. At
the top of Act II, Channing’s Dolly comes back the Harmonia Gardens
Restaurant to get her man, and, as Dolly says, to “return to the
human race” after the death of her first husband. She appears at
the top of a grand staircase, dressed to the nines, while galloping
waiters belt out the title song that dislodged the Beatles from the
top of the pop charts.
The song “Hello, Dolly!” became a cultural touchstone, one of
the last great pop hits to come from Broadway – so big at the time
it became Lyndon Johnson’s campaign song. “I went to Atlantic
City,” she says, still sounding a little astonished, “and sang
‘Hello Lyndon!’ for the opening of the 1964 Democratic
Convention.”
“(The show) was a smash,” Channing understates. And so was
she.
She beat out Barbra Streisand for that year’s Tony Award for
best performance by a female in a leading role in a musical. La
Streisand was nominated for “Funny Girl.”
“We did more than 5,000 performances of ‘Dolly,” says Channing,
who is justly revered for never having missed a performance.
Never.
“But I’ve never tired of ‘Dolly’.”
Neither has the public.
She’s worked through sickness and health, dark days and
bright.
“Sometimes I thought I couldn’t get thought it. I’ve got a
virus. I even had cancer! At the end of each show, I either felt
better or I was healing.”
The theater for Channing is more like a temple, she says, a
place for hope, healing and enlightenment.
“You give a little piece of yourself to the audience, and they
give you a little appreciation back,” she says. “And the
give-and-take is healing. It heals your fellow actors. It heals the
audience. It certainly healed me.”
“Dolly,” though, is just the summit of this trouper’s career.
She was a star the night the curtain came down on Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes in 1949, after she belted out what would become two of her
signature songs, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and “Little
Girl from Little Rock.”
She starred in six TV specials, made countless guest spots over
the decades, has ten gold original cast albums, a couple of Tony
Awards, and a Golden Globe among her trophies.
But no Oscar.
She’s done film, of course, most notable “Thoroughly Modern
Millie,” but was passed over for the film version of “Dolly” for a
much younger Streisand.
How did she feel about that?
“Suicidal,” she snaps. “Streisand was far too young for the
role. That wasn’t the only thing that went wrong with (the film).
It wasn’t funny. She’s one of our greatest singers, in fact,
probably the greatest of the 20th century, but … not funny.”
Is there any role she regrets not having taken?
“‘Mame’,” she says, again, without hesitation.
“(Composer) Jerry Herman told me he wrote ‘Mame’ for me.” But
personal complications kept her from the role and Angela Lansbury
made it her “Dolly.”
But that’s all greasepaint under the bridge, as the title of
Channing’s one-woman show, “The First Eighty Years Are the
Hardest,” suggests.
In the fall she took the show to New York City and the New York
Times reported “the audience jumped to its feet more than once. We
were watching a master performer.”
The 90-minute act of memories, stories and songs by the last of
Great Broadway Babies, delivered in that unmistakable – and highly
imitative – voice, marks Channing’s Bradford debut, a notion that
makes her chuckle.
“You know,” she laughs, “my son used to tell me: ‘Don’t tell the
elevator operator what floor you want to go to. I’ll tell her. The
moment you open your mouth and say ‘Nine, please,’ everyone will
turn and say ‘hello’.”
How right he is.
Tickets for Carol Channing’s “The First Eighty Years Are the
Hardest” are available by calling or visiting the BCPAC office at
10 Marilyn Horne Way.
