THE STORY:
Hello, Dolly! is a musical with lyrics and music by Jerry Herman and a book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder’s 1938 farce The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder revised and retitled The Matchmaker in 1955.
Hello, Dolly! had rocky out-of-town tryouts in Detroit and Washington, D.C. After receiving the reviews, the creators made major changes to the script and score, including the addition of the song, “Before the Parade Passes By”. The show was originally entitled Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman and Call on Dolly but Merrick changed the title immediately upon hearing Louis Armstrong’s version of “Hello, Dolly”. The show became one of the most iconic Broadway shows of its era, the latter half of the 1960s, running for 2,844 performances, and was for a time the longest-running musical in Broadway history. During that decade, ten “blockbuster” musicals played over 1,000 performances and three played over 2,000, helping to redefine “success” for the Broadway musical genre.
(Wikipedia.org)
Komische Oper Berlin