There’s quite an impressive performance going on at the Shubert Theatre right now, a dizzying Broadway spectacle. The performance is that being given by the audience for Hello, Dolly! which is under a sort of spell suggestive of rapt Scientologists hearing one more time about how Earth was founded by spacemen from the Galactic Confederacy. The audience cheers the overture, the costumes, the set, and especially—deliriously—the star of the show. Yet the Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium–level pandemonium being unleashed nightly by Bette Midler is somewhat in excess of what is merited. At age seventy-one, Midler sings like a rusty bandsaw being fed into a coffee grinder, and she moves like Frankenstein’s monster in a body cast. When the rest of the cast dances, she shuffles laterally a bit. No matter: the audience cheers lustily when we first see her, and again when she makes her next entrance, and her next. When she triumphantly materializes at the top of a red-carpeted staircase to deliver the title number in a red sequined dress and a matching feathered hat the size of a jumbo turkey, the applause stops the show for long enough that it’s an ideal time to consider going out for a sandwich. Parents of grade-schoolers at the spring pageant were never more blind to the performance shortcomings of their offspring. But the school show probably doesn’t charge $299 for “premium orchestra” tickets.

I think two factors underlie the early reaction to Hello, Dolly!among theater insiders: nostalgia and massive pent-up