Bette Midler has never seen "Hello, Dolly!" onstage.
Sure, she'd seen the movie, and she was generally familiar with the story, but when the producer Scott Rudin started calling her some months ago, asking her to consider starring in a revival of the musical on Broadway, she realized she needed to do some homework.
She went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to watch a film of Carol Channing in the 1995 revival, and to YouTube to watch clips of Pearl Bailey in the 1975 revival. She watched "The Matchmaker," a 1958 film starring Shirley Booth, which is adapted from the same Thornton Wilder play that inspired the musical.
And that was not all. She read production notes from Gower Champion, who directed the original production in 1964. She listened to cast albums. And finally she read the script, which persuaded her that the title character, a turn-of-the-century widow named Dolly Gallagher Levi, had more need and desperation than she had realized.
She said yes.
"It has an enormous amount of weight, and the score is irresistible," Ms. Midler said in a telephone interview hours after her agreement to star in a revival of "Hello, Dolly!" was announced. "It's a very American thing, with a joyous quality, a kind of can-do quality, and an incredible sweetness, and in these dire times, when the whole world seems to be on fire, it seems like something people would love to see."
Ms. Midler's Dolly will arrive on Broadway in the spring of 2017, 50 years after the actress first appeared on Broadway as Tzeitel in the original production of "Fiddler on the Roof." In the intervening years, Ms. Midler has become an enormously popular entertainer, best known for her film roles and her concert performances. In the 1970s, she appeared on Broadway in a series of concert shows; then she returned in 2013 for a one-woman play ("which pleased me no end") called "I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers."
Her biggest complaint? Midtown traffic. "Getting to the theater was a real chore. A couple of times, I had to get out of the car and run."