Hello, Dolly! 1969 Casting, Screen Tests and Music

Streisand / Movies

Hello, Dolly!

Opened December 16, 1969 [Continued ....]

Casting Dolly’s Supporting Actors

With Streisand and Matthau cast in the starring roles, the rest of Hello, Dolly!’s cast had to be filled. “We've created a new Dolly Levi, a very young widow,” Kelly explained. “Her husband's death has been recent, she's more in love with his memory. This also has meant all the people had to be younger. To get young players with experience I literally interviewed 1,000-2,000 people.”
Gene Kelly told his wife, Patricia Ward Kelly, that he had difficulty casting performers who could sing, dance and play comedy.

“It’s not just a matter of talent,” Gene Kelly told one newspaper, “you have to pair the right boys with the right girls, and the entire company has to have an ensemble look. I’m waiting until all the tests are finished, then I’ll sit down in a screening room, look them over for comparative compatibilities, size one person up against another and then make up my mind.”

Here’s some of the people who screen tested for the main roles:

Casting

Irene & Minnie

Considered, screen tested, but not cast:

  • Trisha Noble and Sandy Duncan [pictured]
  • Kathy Hays (Mrs. Glenn Ford) and Isabelle Farrell
  • Phyllis Newman and Sandra Lee
  • For Irene:  Yvette Mimieux and Ann-Margret

Irene

Molloy

Gene Kelly cast Marianne McAndrew as Irene Malloy. McAndrew actually already played the milliner in a stage production of The Matchmaker in Pennsylvania. She also toured the U.S. in the musical Half a Sixpence before Gene Kelly noticed her while searching for actresses in New York.  Dolly  was her first film. “It’s primarily an acting role,” McAndrew explained, “although I do have to sing and dance – neither of which I did when they picked me for the part. I’ve managed in my own fashion to pick up all the necessities. But it’ll be somebody else’s voice on the screen.” McAndrews’ solo vocals in the film were dubbed by Melissa Stafford (one of Dean Martin’s Golddiggers singers); Gilda Maiken dubbed her ensemble vocals.

Cornelius &

Barnaby

Hampton Fancher and James Dybas tested together on December 4, 1967.


Fancher later wrote the screenplay for the 1982 film Blade Runner.

Minnie

Faye

E.J. Peaker, cast as Minnie, was appearing on the ABC musical series, That’s Life,  with Robert Morse.  Dolly was Peaker’s first film as well. “Boy, I sure like Gene Kelly. I was so scared the first time I went to talk to him, I could hardly talk. He knew I was scared and when he sent me over to talk to Michael Kidd, he says to me, ‘E.J., G.K. thinks you’re ok.’ Isn’t that sweet?”

Cornelius

Hackl

British actor Michael Crawford was cast by associate producer Roger Edens, who caught Crawford’s Broadway performance in the Peter Shaffer comedy Black Comedy. A meeting with Gene Kelly was arranged. “We met during the Film Festival in San Francisco,” Crawford related, “and he asked me ‘Can you speak with an American accent, can you sing, and can you dance?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ although I wasn’t a dancer. So a test was arranged four days later in London.  I hurried home, found a great choreographer who worked with me three days solid from eight in the morning until ten at night.  The test got me the role.”


To lose his English accent, Crawford confessed, “I just listened to Woody Woodbury on his records,” he said. (Woodbury is an American comedian). “I learned from his accent. I practiced it everywhere, in the bath, on the phone.”

Barnaby

Tucker

Danny Lockin tested for Barnaby in January 1968 and won the part. He’d already played Barnaby for two years in the Hello, Dolly! road company. He made his Broadway debut on April 8, 1964, in West Side Story in New York City in the role of Gee-Tar.

Casting

Ermengarde & Ambrose

Joyce Ames tested as Ermengarde with Ron Rifkin as Ambrose on December 4, 1967.  Ames was cast as Ermengarde.  Her real last name was “James,” but she had to change it to “Ames” because there was already a “Joyce James” in the Screen Actors Guild, and actors are not permitted to have the same professional names. She stands four-feet-ten-inches tall next to her love interest.

Gussie

Granger

Judy Knaiz was originally considered for Minnie Fay but ended up being cast as Gussie Granger.  Laugh In funny lady Jo Anne Worley tested for Gussie, as did Broadway actress Peggy Murray.

Ambrose

Kemper

It was six-foot-five-inch dancer Tommy Tune who ended up winning the role of Ambrose Kemper.  Tune was not only a talented professional dancer, but it was the juxtaposition of Tommy Tune’s height with Ames that created a visual joke for the mismatched lovers. “I was dancing in the chorus of a show called How Now, Dow Jones,” Tune recalled, “and the talent scouts from 20th Century-Fox were casting the movie Hello Dolly, and she found me in the chorus of that show and came back and said, “I want to send you to Hollywood for a screen test for Hello, Dolly!”

Dolly Costume and Screen Tests ...

Because the studio was spending a fortune on the production of Hello, Dolly! many tests were done before beginning principal photography began in April 1968. “The screen tests were elaborate,” actress E.J. Peaker recalled. “They did screen tests not just on the acting, but in hair, makeup, the gowns…”

In February and April 1968, Twentieth Century-Fox’s artists experimented with Barbra Streisand’s makeup, wig, and costumes for Dolly Levi in a series of screen tests. Streisand's favorite cinematographer, Harry Stradling, took one week off between shooting Funny Girl and Dolly, and was back to work filming some of these tests.

Dan Striepeke was head of Fox’s makeup department and designed the look of the women in the film. “The whole thing that we were trying to create between Ernie Lehman, Gene Kelly, and myself was a John Singer Sargent type of look, the way he painted his ladies of that era. They were very milk white. That was the whole tenor of the makeup on that film. I worked very closely with Harry Stradling and the lab. We did extensive testing and were very successful at it.”

Streisand’s Gibson-style golden-red hair was a look that Striepeke felt offset “the beauty of her blue eyes.” This hairdo was very soft, with a bun on top and ringlets and tendrils hanging down. The hairstyle was inspired by pen-and-ink illustrator Charles Gibson who drew women of that era who personified the ideal American beauty.

Streisand herself had very specific ideas for the wig, which she put in writing. She was inspired by the hair on the model Twiggy, photographed by Richard Avedon for a November 1, 1967 Vogue Magazine spread. “The secret of this hairdo is the finest (baby fine) hair, natural if possible,” Streisand instructed. “We must see air thru it,” she wrote, meaning that up close on camera, the wind must blow the fine hair, otherwise the illusion of natural hair would be ruined. Streisand even drew her look in the letter. “Wisps around front, sides & back … much highlighting around face & sides; less toward back, so head is shaded and natural looking.”
Below: A photo gallery of makeup, hair, and costume tests.... Click the arrows to navigate.

“Nothing in my screenplay will indicate that Dolly had been married for X years and widowed for Y years. As a matter of fact in Thornton Wilder’s original play, ‘The Matchmaker,’ from which ‘Dolly’ was adapted as a stage musical, he noted all characters’ ages except that of Dolly, which he set down as ‘uncertain age.’ She could well be a widow in her 30s.” 

... Producer/Writer Ernest Lehman

Dolly's Music

“The score to me is lovely,” Barbra Streisand said about Jerry Herman’s music for Hello, Dolly!, “a very underrated score.”

And at Twentieth Century-Fox, Herman’s score received first-class treatment. Lionel Newman was the head of the Fox music department, which meant he supervised “every note of music in every feature picture and television show released by the company.” (His older brother, Alfred Newman, worked at the studio, too, and Lionel’s nephew is songwriter Randy Newman – “Short People” and the score for Toy Story.)

Both Lionel Newman and Lennie Hayton supervised and conducted the score for Hello, Dolly! Hayton had a musical pedigree from his work at MGM on iconic musicals like Singing in the Rain and On the Town. He mingled with amazing talents like Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, and his wife, Lena Horne.

Lionel Newman praised Barbra Streisand. “Temperamental? Forget it,” he told the press. “She’s a doll. A day when she should have been home with a bad cold, she insisted on coming to the studio and going over three songs with me even though she couldn’t sing a note.”

In transferring Dolly from stage to screen, there were only a couple of songs from Jerry Herman’s score which were not utilized for the film.

  • “I Put My Hand In” was Dolly’s opening number in the stage play. It was replaced in the movie by “Just Leave Everything to Me.” You can hear an orchestrated version of “I Put My Hand In” during the film’s polka contest scene.
  • “Motherhood” was sung on stage in Irene Molloy's hat shop, but Ernest Lehman did not use it in the film. Jerry Herman reportedly hated the song, possibly because his conniving Broadway producer David Merrick hired Bob Merrill (who wrote Funny Girl’s lyrics) to write additional songs for Dolly during its pre-Broadway tryouts, and “Motherhood” was one of them. This irked Herman, who wanted the score to Dolly to be exclusively his own music, and it’s said Herman insisted it not be included in the film.
For the Dolly movie, Jerry Herman contributed two new songs. 

The new ballad for Streisand to sing in the film was “Love is Only Love,” a Herman “trunk song” – the term for a composer’s song that was written for one show, put away for another time, then taken out for a different show. “Love is Only Love” had the same tune as the song “Gotta Be A Dream,” which Jerry Herman wrote for a 1961 musical, Madame Aphrodite (it ran for 13 performances). The song was then rewritten as “Love is Only Love” for Herman's 1966 hit musical, Mame— but it was cut from the show. Herman then interpolated the song into the Hello, Dolly! movie for Streisand. He added the “Mrs. Horace Vandergelder” introduction to make it Dolly-specific. He based the lyrics to the new intro on a short monologue Ernest Lehman wrote in his screenplay to set up the song.

Profile of Streisand as Dolly near the Hudson River
“Just Leave Everything To Me” was written specifically for Barbra for the film. “Barbra asked for a new opening number,” Herman said. “She had just recorded ‘The Minute Waltz’ and she wanted to open the show with a song like that. ‘You know how I love to do those fast things,’ she told me. ‘Can you write me something I can do at a really fast clip?’” That's all I had to hear. And, boy, was it wonderfully sung.”

Just Leave Everything To Me — music & lyrics by Jerry Herman

If you want your sister courted
Brother wed or cheese imported
Just leave ev'rything to me
If you want your roof inspected
Eyebrows tweezed or bills collected
Just leave ev'rything to me
 
If you want your daughter dated 
Or some marriage consummated
For a rather modest fee
If you want a husband spotted
Boyfriend traced or chicken potted
I'll arrange for making all arrangements
Just leave ev'rything to me
 
If you want your ego bolstered
Muscles toned or chair upholstered
Just leave ev'rything to me
Charming social introductions
Expert mandolin instructions
Just leave ev'rything to me
If you want your culture rounded
French improved or torso pounded
With a ten-year guarantee
If you want a birth recorded
Collies bred or kittens boarded
I'll proceed to plan the whole procedure
Just leave ev'rything to me
 
If you want a law abolished
Jewelry sold or tonenails polished
Just leave ev'rything to me
If you want your liver tested
Glasses made or cash invested
Just leave ev'rything to me
If you want your children coddled
Corsets boned or furs remodeled
Or some nice fresh fricassee
If you want your bustle shifted
Wedding planned or bosom lifted
I'll discreetly use my own discretion
I'll arrange for making all arrangements
I'll proceed to plan the whole procedure
Just leave ev'rything 
To me!

Dolly’s Orchestrations

In the film’s opening credits, ten men are credited for the music orchestrations and dance and choral arrangements. Working together seamlessly, these musically gifted men gave Hello, Dolly! a beautiful, integrated score. Not only did they orchestrate and arrange the film’s songs, but they also created the underscore.


[ Pictured: Fox's Lionel Newman and Lennie Hayton] 

Here, in the order in which they are credited, are Hello, Dolly!'s orchestrators:


Philip J. Lang – Lang was known for as a Broadway arranger, having worked on the stage production of Hello, Dolly! (1964), as well as Mame (1966), and Annie (1977).  For the 1969 movie, Lang arranged “It Takes A Woman” for Matthau and the men.  He is also credited for the orchestration of the title song, as well as the “Finale.” He is co-credited (with Alexander Courage) on the “Waiter’s Galop.”  Streisand explained that for the song “Hello, Dolly!”, “I always thought it should be a little slower at the beginning, a little out of tempo; dealing more specifically and personally with each one of the waiters.”  


Lennie Hayton – Although Hayton helped supervise all the music, he is only credited for two cues. He arranged the exciting up-tempo version of Streisand’s “So Long Dearie.” He is also credited for the “one more time!” reprise of “Hello, Dolly!” For “Dearie,” Streisand said, “When I first saw it on the stage, I thought to myself, oh gee … that should be twice as fast. It should be as fast as one can understand the words. Cause I was thinking maybe I would do the song on one of my personal albums. So now, when it turns out that I’m doing the movie, I said, Oh good, I would like to do ‘So Long Dearie’ like this, and they geared the whole staging of the number around the kind of tempo and interpretation of the way I want to do it now. And I think it turned out rather well.”



Herbert Spencer – The big “Dancing” number was broken into several parts.  Herbert Spencer arranged the first two parts, then shared the rest of the number (including the dance music) with Philip J. Lang. Spencer also arranged “Love is Only Love,” although Alexander Courage wrote the orchestration. Finally, Spencer arranged the film’s “Entr’acte.”



Alexander Courage – He began his career at MGM, orchestrated for composers like André Previn and John Williams, and is most famous for the Star Trek TV theme.  Courage was very involved in the Hello, Dolly! arrangements, mostly writing the music that underscored and bridged scenes.  The “Clip Clop / Call on Dolly” music that opens the movie was adapted and arranged by Courage; as was the “Main Title.” In addition, he composed the orchestral music that bridged the scene to Dolly’s reprise of “It Takes A Woman.”  That cue came right after Streisand says, “Just keep all your thoughts on that lovely Irene Malloy!”  Another musical cue by Courage was underneath Streisand’s first “Ephraim” monologue in Yonkers (“Not acquaintances, Ermengarde, friends …”) More comedic cues were written by Courage to underscore the antics in Irene Malloy’s hat shop: “Mrs. Mortimer’s Hat,” “Wolf Trap,” “Sticky Foot,” “Closet Feather,” and “The Vandergelder Stomp.”  For the big “Dancing” number, it appears that Courage arranged its finale, including the slow “Lovers in the Park” section right before Irene interrupts Dolly on the park bench.  All the music following Streisand’s slow, ballad version of “Before the Parade Passes By” was by Alexander Courage – the underscoring of the Ephraim monologue, Dolly’s vocals running to catch the parade, the parade itself, and the finale of the song. Courage then orchestrated “Love is Only Love” and had a hand in the “Waiter’s Galop.” He wrote the underscore for the bridge between part one and two of “It Only Takes A Moment,” as well as Streisand’s “Goodbyes” in “So Long, Dearie.”  The “End Title” was done by Courage, too.



Don Costa – Costa worked with Streisand often on her Columbia Records albums.  For Dolly, Costa arranged her ballads.  He worked on “It Takes A Woman (Reprise)” and the opening, slow version of “Before the Parade Passes By.” 



Warren Barker – Barker had the privilege of arranging the big number, “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” as well as “Elegance.” Fans of the TV show Bewitched will be interested to know Barker composed the incidental music for that series.



Frank Comstock – He arranged just one song for the film, the opening number “Just Leave Everything to Me.”



Joseph Lipman – He arranged “Ribbons Down My Back” and “It Only Takes A Moment.”


In 1997 Jerry Herman reflected on the film version of Hello, Dolly! “I like the film more every time I see it,” he said. “And it's a great credit to Barbra because she knew she was too young. She's a smart cookie. She knew she was 27 years old playing a 60-year-old woman. And she devised a way to do it that works today, that's lasted. She used that kind of pseudo Mae West, you know, whatever she devised. She's just so clever. And my God, she sang the hell out of it. I love the film much more than I did when it was released.”

STAGE SHOW VS. MOVIE

Here's several ways that Ernest Lehman's movie adaptation of Hello, Dolly! differed from the Broadway show ....

 

  • The movie Dolly was renamed.  In the show she is “Dolly Gallagher Levi” ... For the film she's simply “Dolly Levi,” losing her Irish maiden name.
  • Ernest Lehman’s film script had Dolly specifically telling Cornelius & Barnaby to meet Irene & Minnie at the hat shop. In the stage version, both men just happen to go there. Lehman makes it clear: Dolly is meddling in order to create a scene at the hat shop, which suits her designs on Horace Vandergelder!
  • When the show was revived on Broadway in March 2017 with Bette Midler, “Penny in My Pocket,” an Act II song for Horace Vandergelder (played by David Hyde Pierce), was restored. The song was dropped from the original show. 
  • In the Broadway show, after the polka contest at Harmonia Gardens, the cast is taken to night court since none of them paid for dinner. It is there that the young lovers sing “It Only Takes A Moment” and Dolly gives Horace her ultimatum with “So Long, Dearie.” Screenwriter Lehman cut the night court scenes for the movie and simply sent the characters into Central Park and the streets of New York City. (Also, Dolly’s cousin was the judge in the Broadway courtroom!)
  • For the film, Lehman ejected Irene Malloy’s status as a widower. She is known as “Miss Malloy” in the movie and all references to her husband from the play were not included.

 

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