Michael Crawford will never forget dancing with Barbra Streisand in the 1969 musical adaption Hello, Dolly! — or playfully clashing with her over the choreography. “Barbra said to [director] Gene Kelly, ‘He needs to go here. I’ve got to be on that side,'” the 77-year-old actor revealed to Closer Weekly in the magazine’s latest issue, on newsstands now. “I said, ‘I haven’t got enough time to get there, and you look just the same on this side.’ She said, ‘What a mouth! He looks so innocent.’ She was great — we got on very well.”
It was a light moment in an often tense production that was the most expensive musical ever made at the time. Though no one could sing Jerry Herman’s 1964 Broadway score like Barbra (and she got a Golden Globe nomination for the role), many felt she was miscast as a middle-aged, widowed matchmaker who pursues a “half-millionaire” played by Walter Matthau.
Surprisingly, even Barbra agreed. “I did feel that Dolly was the story of older people and they should hire Elizabeth Taylor to play her,” she once said. Others pined for Tony winner Carol Channing, who originated the role on Broadway. “But when everybody seemed against me,” said Barbra, “I took up the challenge.”
Michael won over dance legend Gene more easily. “Gene got up on a coffee table, did a few steps and invited me on it. I thought, this is the most exciting thing in my life,” he recalled. “He did four or five steps and asked, ‘Can you do that and count to four? If you can count to four, you can dance.'”
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