My friend, Tony Lin, found a way to take several screen shots of me behind Barbra Streisand in the Put on Your Sunday Clothes number from the 1969 film of Hello, Dolly! In the summer of 1968, after just returning to New York from the national tour of Hello, Dolly! starring Dorothy Lamour, I was hired to be a dancer in the film version. What you don’t see in these photos was the tremendous amount of sweat on each of us, as this was filmed in nearly 100° weather. Makeup artists were on top of us—and yes, Ms. Streisand— every couple minutes, repairing our dripping faces. To see a clip of the number click here. For another article on this movie, click here.
Although most of the movie had been shot in Hollywood, Gene Kelly, who directed, needed some extra dancers for two numbers shot in New York State. The first number, which the above photos depict, was shot onboard an antique train in the actual railroad station in Garrison, New York. The town was made to look like a turn-of-the-century recreation of Yonkers, New York. The station was revamped, and the streets surrounding it were painted to look as though they were paved with brick—all done so realistically that you had to touch the ground to be certain it wasn’t real.
The Garrison, NY, railroad station.
The shooting was frequently interrupted to allow actual scheduled trains to pass through. The number is not very long, but it still took days and days to complete the filming.
The second number—the wedding-scene finale— was shot across the river from Garrison at West Point, where a full-size church was flown in by helicopter and placed at the tip of the point.
The finale at West Point.
To read some of my hilarious tales of this six-week saga, check out my autobiography, The Wrong Side of the Room: A Life in Music Theater.
