Hello, Dolly
Late Night Theatre initiates its new space downtown by making it a shrine — physically and artistically — to the busty charms of Dolly Parton. The legendary singer’s backwoods twang and guileless voice may seem at odds with Late Night’s brand of high-camp high jinks, like putting a Southern Baptist in a lace teddy. But the dichotomy makes sense when you recall Parton’s self-deprecating quip, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Come Back to the 9 to 5 Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton pays homage to the troika of Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda that made Nine to Five the comedy smash of 1980. The movie’s feminist take on the executive assistants and secretarial pools that form the backbone of American business wasn’t heavy-handed or preachy; it took it on faith that everyone knew women ruled the world and men were buffoons.
As in other Late Night productions, the actors have character names but are really playing the stars who played them on screen. Violet Newstead (Ron Megee as Tomlin) is the designated chief of the administrative staff. Whether she likes it or not, management looks to her to train the new hires, which she does with the nervous Judy Bernly (David Wayne Reed as Fonda) and the honeydewed Doralee Rhodes (Gary Campbell as Parton). Before you can say “coffee break,” the members of this trio have bonded like a starlet’s teeth, setting up the chips that fall atop their chauvinistic boss, Mr. Hart (David Stone).
Hart screws up by assuming his female workers like their boobs ogled and their rumps pinched. But they’re brainier and shrewder than he thinks, and it nearly topples him. It’s not just the men who devalue women, either. Roz (Ray Ettinger in the role deftly played by Rosemary Murphy) shares the women’s office space but thinks she intellectually towers over them. She gets her comeuppance, too.
About halfway through, Violet, Judy and Doralee think they’ve killed their boss. When it’s revealed that he’s still very much alive, they decide to take him out of the picture anyway and hold him hostage in his own home. Fans of the movie will recall Dabney Coleman’s Mr. Hart trussed up to the garage-door opener like a masochistic grease monkey. Here the cast employs a mammoth piece of equipment used in hospitals to move large or otherwise ungainly patients. The trio also sends Roz packing — off to Europe for a crash course in foreign languages — and, lo and behold, the office becomes female-friendly.
Nailing several supporting roles is De De Deville as Hart’s wife and, most memorably, the office lush whose “atta girl” serves as the girls’ motto. New to Late Night are Russell Keith (as Judy’s husband, a cop and the heavily bearded Maria Delgado) and Chadwick Brooks as a temp who introduces scenes with posters in the manner of a vaudeville tart — and punches a centrally located time clock every time he enters and exits. When he mistimes this witty bit, it gives the cast more time to ad lib.
As Mr. Hart, Stone has to personify everything unctuous about boss men; he’s sleazy and slimy in no small doses. But he’s probably the show’s most consistent character, and Stone gives him a human side. He deserves a place in office hell but, when the employees’ morale is boosted at the close of the show, he doesn’t fight it — there’s a heart in the old Hart still.
Although the show is a bit dozier than previous Late Night productions (perhaps due to an unusually calm crowd), there’s clever subtext galore. Megee reinterprets the Tomlin character as a ferocious lesbian (she can’t keep her hand out of various cookie jars), and Campbell wields Doralee’s massive breasts like uzis. At first, Reed plays Fonda playing Judy as a dithering lamb set free in an unfamiliar forest. But as the girls’ plots and cover-ups thicken, so does Judy’s skin, and you know at the close of the show that her liberation is fully engaged.
De De Deville and Andy Chambers duet as costume designers, deriving inspiration from every late ’70s pantsuit in the city; they also give life to Parton’s song “Coat of Many Colors.” Chambers’ expertise with makeup and wigs comes in handy, especially for Campbell, who dons Dolly tresses from every period of her glitzy career — in fact, the proscenium is an assemblage of Dolly-bilia that would do any drag queen proud.
Late Night’s musical numbers always play to the theme — recall “When Doves Cry” in The Birds. But Reed’s love of Parton keeps her repertoire front and center. There’s an opening number set to the movie’s theme song and a well-placed “Two Doors Down,” among others. Like musicals of old, the songs are there for diversion, not to advance the story. They’re little “Islands in the Stream” along a typical Late Night journey.
