Hello Dolly Audition Information—Part Two

Hello gang! Below please find the monologues for Hello Dolly auditions. Girls, please read for Dolly, boys please read for Horace Vandergelder. Please also take note of the context I’ve provided for you. Always keep in mind who you are talking to and what your character wants through their speech. Print out the monologue, write on it, make notes, create a character (but obviously memorize it for your audition). Do your personal best and make it your own! I believe in all of you!

Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi—An indefatigable meddling matchmaker of strikingly dramatic appearance; a widow in her middle years.

Horace Vandergelder— Proprietor of a Hay & Feed Store in Yonkers, N.Y. and a client of Mrs. Levi’s. A widower of some means

DOLLY

[Context: This monologue takes place in the second scene of the first act. Dolly is talking to Ambrose Kemper, a young artist seeking to marry Horace Vandergelder’s seventeen-year-old niece, Ermengarde. Vandergelder doesn’t approve of Ambrose, so Dolly is trying to find ways for Ambrose to be financially independent. If he participates in the dance contest and wins, that will help. Talking to him about the restaurant makes her start to reminisce about her late husband.]

Monologue: Now there’s a man, Rudolph Reisenweber, at the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant on Fourteenth Street, I’ll give you a note for him and we’ll see if he can’t have you both entered in the polka contest tonight. The prize is a week’s engagement and a gold cup. Oh, the cups we won, Ephraim and me! My late husband Ephraim Levi believed in life and anyplace you could find it . . . cafes, ballrooms, yes even theatres! Why, even when times were bad, every Saturday night like clockwork down those stairs at the Harmonia Gardens we came, Ephraim and me . . .Now you go to the Harmonia Gardens this afternoon and say Mrs. Levi sent you and incidentally tell Rudolph that Dolly’s coming back and I want a table for two and a chicken for eight o’clock tonight!

VANDERGELDER

[Context: Also act once scene two, Horace Vandergelder just told his two clerks Cornelius and Barnaby that he is going to New York and he will come back with a wife. To celebrate his impending marriage, he says he is promoting Cornelius to chief clerk. Cornelius then asks if he can have one night off a week. This monologue is Vandergelder’s response.]

Monologue: So that’s the way you thank me for your promotion, is it? No sir, you’ll attend to the store as usual! Now get back to work! And don’t forget to put the lid on the sheep dip! Evenings off, marrying artists . . . Foolishness! Ninety-nine percent of the people in this world are fools . . .And the rest of us are in great danger of contamination! Why, even I was once young, which was foolish; and got married, which was foolish; and was poor which was more foolish than anything else. Then my wife died which was foolish of her; I grew older which was sensible of me; and became rich, friendless and mean, which in Yonkers is about as far as you can go!