Opening of Hello, Dolly!

Date: January 16, 1964 • Location: East Village, United States

The musical Hello, Dolly! opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, and went on to win ten Tony Awards, a record that stood for 37 years.

Hello, Dolly! is a 1964 musical with lyrics and music by Jerry Herman and a book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder's 1938 farce The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder revised and retitled The Matchmaker in 1954. The musical follows the story of Dolly Gallagher Levi, a strong-willed matchmaker, as she travels to Yonkers, New York, to find a match for the miserly "well-known unmarried half-a-millionaire" Horace Vandergelder.