Copious Notes

Horace Vandergelder (Greg Wilson, center in yellow shirt) and the men at his Hay and Feed store sing "It Takes A Woman." Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

If you can walk out of Hello, Dolly! saying, “That was fun,” then mission accomplished.

This is not one of those musicals that are supposed to help you realize deeper truths about life and the human condition or to leave you enraptured by compelling drama. Dolly is a little confection that says we take life a bit too seriously.

And Paragon Music Theatre has accomplished the mission of offering a fun evening with its production of the Jerry Herman-Michael Stewart musical, which opened Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Lexington Opera House.

Director Robyn Peterman-Zahn has created a traditional rendition of the show with some impressive set pieces designed by Josh Hurley and backdrops designed by Liz Weyer.

Much of the fun of this evening can be attributed to the leading actors and the men of the ensemble.

Alicia Helm McCorvey as Dolly makes the part her own.

Alicia Helm McCorvey is not your Dolly Levi from Central Casting. If your deep desire is an idiosyncratic performance along the lines of Carol Channing or Barbra Streisand, this is not that. Then again, I don’t know who would be the Dolly from Central Casting in Lexington.

When you don’t have that obvious option, the thing to do is give the role to a terrific performer and let her make it her own, which is what McCorvey does.

Her Dolly is wistful, fanciful and maternal. McCorvey’s operatic voice also soars higher than traditional Dollys, presumably with some custom orchestration by music director Ryan Shirar. McCorvey has an instrument that’s different from that of anyone else on stage, but that’s fine, because Dolly is set apart from the rest of the characters.

McCorvey’s voice seemed to provide a particular challenge in the sound department: She frequently overpowered the microphone. If she is going to be miked, she needs to be more smoothly mixed with the other voices.

And there are other great voices on stage. With Dolly, Paragon continues a trend of making discoveries, principally Greg Wilson as Horace Vandergelder, Rebecca Rudd as Irene Molloy and Evan Pulliam as Barnaby Tucker.

Wilson sparks the show to life when leading the men in the ensemble in It Takes a Woman. He naturally steps to the front of the stage and engages the audience, and that is essential to soften Horace’s rough exterior.

Rudd was luminous in her rendition of Ribbons Down My Back. And Pulliam was a bolt of energy, elevating Barnaby above the role of simple sidekick.

This brings up one frustration: the lack of cast biographies in the program. I really wanted to know more about each of these new faces.

The familiar names of Jan Hooker and Adam Richard Fister rounded out the lead ensemble, and whenever any combination of that group was on stage, the show was fine.

It also was in great shape with the men, in Horace’s shop in Act I and as the staff of the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant in Act II. They had loads of personality and were a collective triple threat. It was in the large ensemble scenes that some of the air came out of the show. The movement felt confused, but the real letdown was a lack of vocal power, particularly in the opening number, Call on Dolly. The Act I closer defied that problem, again with a lot of help from the principals.

And again, the overall sensation was fun, which is exactly what a production of Hello, Dolly! should be.

More Dolly:

• Adam Richard Fister is an extrovert on stage only.
• Hello, Dolly! slide show.

As promised, here’s the slideshow from the first act of Paragon Music Theatre’s Hello, Dolly! Oct. 22-25 at the Lexington Opera House.

Feature story: Adam Richard Fister has become a staple of Lexington musical theater.

Ryan Shirar and Robyn Peterman-Zahn during rehearsals for "The King and I." Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Paragon Music Theatre served up a surprise hit with its summer cabaret programs at Natasha’s Bistro & Bar last year, so they are back for another round.

“We always appreciate the opportunity to feature people in ways that we simply cannot do during our mainstage productions,” says Ryan Shirar, music director of Paragon.

Last year’s cabaret was sort of a soft debut for the theater’s new stage director, Robyn Peterman-Zahn, who made a big statement of a main stage debut in the spring with The King and I.

Advertisements for the event promise a cast of 40 — a number that could make the restaurant feel fairly full — singing show tunes. Several e-mails, Facebook messages, etc., have highlighted children in this show as particularly adorable.

Performances are at 8 p.m. tonight (Aug. 3), Tuesday and Aug. 17 and 18. This year, and the programs will be the same. Seating and dinner begins at 6:30 p.m. and showtime is at 8. There will be a $10 cover for the show added to dinner bills. Call (859) 259-2754 for reservations.

The Lexington Philharmonic’s new music director, Scott Terrell, is going to start his tenure with more marquee names on the season schedule than the orchestra has had in quite a while. In addition to Evelyn Glennie, probably the best-known classical solo percussionist in the world Sept. 25, the Phil will also present:

Ronan Tynan.

Irish tenor Ronan Tynan in a concert that will be part of the Alltech Fortnight Festival Oct. 10. Tynan came to fame as one of the Three Irish Tenors and has been a ubiquitous presence at New York Yankees games in the past decade singing the full version of God Bless America. Terrell says this concert will probably tell him a lot about possible directions in which to take a revived Philharmonic Pops season.

World-renowned violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg will join the orchestra for an April 17 concert benefitting UK HealthCare. Terrell says Sonnenberg will be playing Astor Piazolla’s take on The Four Seasons.

Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg. Photo by Grant Leighton.

The violinist added for the Feb. 12 Masterclassics concert is also a bit of a get: Arnaud Sussmann, who won a prestigious Avery Fisher career grant in April along with Alessio Bax, who is the pianist with the UBS Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, Aug. 26-30.

Also added to the full schedule, which will be released next week, are family concerts on Oct. 25 (a Youth Arts concert that will feature members of the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestras playing with the Phil and other young artists) and Dec. 13, which will bring Paragon Music Theatre director Ryan Shirar back to the Philharmonic podium.

Here’s our slide show of Paragon Music Theatre’s production of The King and I. Mouse over the bottom of the slide show to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left of the slide show window for a larger version of the whole show.

The directing debut from a theater’s new artistic director is always an exciting event, and that’s what we get this weekend with Paragon Music Theatre’s production of The King and I. Robyn Peterman-Zahn makes her debut stage directing a Lexington Opera House production for the company — she did direct some cabaret shows at Natasha’s Bistro last summer — with this production running April 23 through April 26. Please enjoy our slideshow, above, and click here to read more about Peterman-Zahn, a Lexington native and professional actor who also is the daughter of clothier John Peterman and wife of actor Steve Zahn.

Dr. Finache (Ryan A. Harr, far left) and Victor (Alex Maddox, middle left) discuss a mysterious letter actually sent by Lucienne (Jesse Rebecca Pavlovic) and Raymonde (Katie Keene) as bait to catch Victor cheating on Raymonde, his wife in the University of Kentucky Theatre production of Georges Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear." Photos by Rich Copley.

The University of ­Kentucky Theatre’s ­season comes to a close this week with, appropriately, an ­innovative show that has the students working to push the bounds of stage work.

Paparazzi: Saviors of the World is appropriate because the UK theater students and professors quietly put together a season that was educational, enlightening and entertaining, which is what a university theater program should do.

Don’t take this as a review of Paparazzi, because I have not seen a second of it. But I am intrigued.

The show was developed in a class with lighting design professor John Holloway, and will make full use of lighting, video, shadows and other techniques to tell a tale of a band of paparazzo, teen-age stars and space aliens.

Jeremy Gillett in"The African Company presents Richard III."

It will be ­fascinating to see what the kids have come up with after a season of ­relaying others’ words. The theater’s choices of others’ words have been pretty cool, too.

It was a year that started with the collaborative spirit of A Flea in Her Ear, the Georges Feydeau farce that inspired Hotel Casablanca, last season’s UK ­Opera Theatre world ­premiere. The students in the production clearly had a blast ­chewing into the script about ­infidelity and mistaken identities.

Then things got serious with John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable. Yes, the timing was interesting with the movie on the horizon as the play was presented in December. But what was really interesting was student actors taking on the Lexington debut of one of the most celebrated scripts in recent memory.

The coincidence was less fortunate with The Grapes of Wrath, but you had to ­appreciate the timeliness of the production and the ambition, giving student ­actors the chance to work with some of Holloway’s huge, exquisite set pieces.

Maybe my favorite move was Carlyle Brown’s The African Company ­Presents Richard III earlier this month.

The story of a ­company of free black actors in early 19th-century New York staging Shakespeare productions that rivaled the white company’s ­productions was marvelous theater history. And it was a great showcase for some talented actors we hope will give Lexington at least a few more performances before possibly pursuing stage careers in ­bigger markets.

The season will close with Paparazzi, which you have to admire for its ambition, and then a reprise of last spring’s production of Arlene ­Hutton’s As It Is in Heaven, at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill from May 15 to 24.

What does the theater do for an encore?

Next season includes a production of Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz directed by a UK graduate who went on to get his master’s while studying with Vogel at Trinity Rep; what department chair Nancy Jones describes as a different “take” on Henrik ­Ibsen’s The Dollhouse; the third presentation from the James W. Rodgers Playwriting Competition, and a production of The Pajama Game that will pair the UK theater kids with area musical theater wiz Ryan Shirar.

No, it’s not puttin’ on the hits, and at the college level, it shouldn’t be. But quietly, UK is putting on some of the best seasons in town.