My friend, Tony Lin, found a way to take a screen shot of me behind Barbra Streisand in the Put on Your Sunday Clothes number from the 1968 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. 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 photo depicts, 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 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 temperature was in the high 90s every day, requiring that makeup people had to step in and redo the cast’s sweaty faces every few minutes.
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.
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.
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