Hello, Bette

Last year, Bette Midler returned to Broadway to star in the revival of Hello, Dolly!, for which she won the Tony Award as Best Actress in Leading Role a Musical.  She didn't perform on the Tony broadcast, for reasons that were never made completely clear, but as best that people can figure it had to do with inflexible Tony rules,that went against a not totally-necessary request by the musical's producers. or something along those lines.  (Apparently the producers wanted to perform the show's opening number with most of the cast, but because the configuration of the Radio City Music Hall stage -- where the Tony's were being done -- they wanted to perform it live, but by remote from their home stage.  The Tony producers didn't want to establish this precdent.

Now, why this is such a terrible precedent (since the number would be done live), and the Tonys have done numbers from on the street outside the theater and from overseas, I'm not sure.  And why the Hello, Dolly! producers couldn't have chosen another number from the show with Bette Midler that could have been done on the Radio City stage, I'm not sure either.  But it wasn't, and instead audiences got co-star David Hyde Pierce alone singing a new song for the revival that was mediocre at best, "Penny in My Pocket."

Well, to rectify things a bit, here's a reasonably good video of Bette Midler and cast with a big production number from the show, "Before the Parade Passes By.”  Nice, too, is that the sequence includes Dolly's lead-in speech to her late-husband Ephraim Levi, and then after the number, a few minutes with David Hyde Pierce.  It's all quite good, though to my surprise I found myself liking the lead-in speech the most.