In Village Theatre’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’ the star razzle dazzles

Theater review

When the title character of “Hello, Dolly!” finally appears in the centerpiece sequence, transforming a madcap restaurant farce into a razzle-dazzle kick line of enthralled waiters, you can sense star Bobbi Kotula has the ensemble eating out of her hand.

For the audience, this has been going on since the curtain rose. Kotula emerges onstage, vaudevillian charm doing numbers on the Richter scale as she introduces us to her Dolly, a brassy, sassy woman-about-town whose work as a matchmaker sits atop a pile of side hustles. Need a mandolin teacher or someone to help with those varicose veins? Dolly’s your gal.

After a run at its Issaquah location, Village Theatre’s “Hello, Dolly!” is on stage at Everett Performing Arts Center through July 30, in a production directed by Timothy McCuen Piggee with understated … shall we say, elegance, as bachelors Cornelius (Markcus Blair) and Barnaby (Rhys Daly) might put it.

They’re among a cast of characters trying to make their way in turn-of-the-century New York. While Cornelius and Barnaby take an unauthorized break from their feed store duties to search for love — or at least a kiss — in the big city with no clue how to find it, widowed milliner Irene (Jessica Skerritt) assumes she’s already had her share of happiness and considers a romantic compromise.

In Michael Stewart’s book, based on the play “The Matchmaker” by Thornton Wilder, Dolly plays foil to everyone else by being the only person to know what she wants and exactly how to get it. On a macro level, that’s securing a marriage proposal from one of her clients, Yonkers miser Horace Vandergelder (Allen Fitzpatrick). But on a micro level, it’s just having a darn good time doing whatever she happens to be doing at the moment.

Kotula relishes every one of these little bits of character work, whether she’s sneaking a piece of candy from a jar or passing out a business card that just so happens to meet a prospective client’s hyper-specific needs. As the MVP in roles small and large at Village Theatre stretching back decades, Kotula has precision-honed an array of comic flavors. Here as the lead, she makes a four-course meal of them.

At one point, she does this literally, in a scene that features her painstakingly picking every last morsel of meat off a bone and leaving no gravy boat unturned, while the entire ensemble takes an extended pregnant pause. This is Kotula’s world — we’re all just living in it.

At the 1964 Tonys, “Hello, Dolly!” won 10 of the 11 awards it was nominated for, beating out “Funny Girl” for best musical and best original score, among others. It’s a hard argument to make now that Jerry Herman’s pleasant but dull score for “Hello, Dolly!” is the superior creation, and in the battle of first-act closing numbers, “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl” trounces Dolly’s “Before the Parade Passes By.”

And though there are enjoyable supporting turns in Village’s production, particularly from Daly, as a rubber-limbed, irrepressible optimist, and Skerritt, whose clarion voice sounds as good as ever, there’s no getting around the fact that Dolly is largely surrounded by two-dimensional cutouts.

None of these is a fatal flaw with the right lead, but it makes “Hello, Dolly!” a precarious act. This isn’t just a musical that offers a showcase role for that performer; it demands a showcase performance to work at all. Fortunately, this production has Kotula, who doesn’t seem to have ever met a show she couldn’t make more entertaining.