It used to be at its best dewy and at its worst damp. Yet this summer the Open Air Theatre has made Regent's Park into a magnetic theatrical arena. In July, Irina Brown's sell-out production of The Importance of Being Earnest made the tree-fringed stage appear not merely decorative but a place designed to aerate a classic. Now the theatre's artistic director, Timothy Sheader, has recuperated Jerry Herman's breezy 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!
Sheader has resisted the temptation to update or relocate this matchmaking story to a modern world of arranged marriages. He has kept it in 1890s New York and makes the flimsy plot seem all of a piece, a non-stop winking, twinkling, pirouetting, parade of done-up-to-the-nines characters, which at times even looks rather decently feminist. This is, after all, that unusual thing, a musical which has as its heroine a woman past the first flush of youth – in fact, heading for the hot flush of middle age. Her unlikely love object, the stingy Yonkers merchant Horace Vandergelder, a "half-millionaire" whose very name is halfway to a vasectomy, sings his own send-up as he warbles: "It takes a woman, all powdered and pink, to joyously clean out the drain in the sink."
Samantha Spiro plays Dolly Levi, the matchmaker who sets off sparks wherever she goes. Spiro has a striking line of antecedents to contend with: not only Streisand in the movie but onstage incarnations by Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, Dora Bryan and Danny La Rue. She can cope with that. Compact and bustling, she's a pocket diva of the libido. It's not a role where the voice is the main thing, though Spiro's is fine: what matters is the capacity to belt out the numbers with vim. Spiro can look as if she's belting even when she isn't. Her eyebrows shoot up, her mouth swivels down: she often looks as if she's tearing off a bottle top with her teeth. It's a demeanour that's quite at home under a hat with waving red feathers that looks as if half a cockatoo has landed.
Hat-work is vital in this musical, which has some claim to setting a comic trend. At its centre (on a par with the hero of the sitcom Beast, which starred a vet who was scared by animals) is a milliner who hates hats: a vision in violet, Josefina Gabrielle has the sweetest voice of the evening. Bonnets create one of the best set pieces when a steam train is formed from a line of actors with canes for pistons, boaters for wheels and hat boxes for the engine; a man's stove pipe hat serves as the vehicle's funnel, from which gushes smoke.
Fuelled by foxtrot, waltz and brisk parade melodies, one set piece – another knockout is Stephen Mear's cleverly choreographed sequence with tapdancing waiters – streams into the next. Peter McKintosh's nifty design spins almost undetectably from restaurant to store to street scene; Simon Mills's lighting flushes and dips to suggest pathos amid all the larky improbability. For a moment, Sheader has made a trifle look like a pavlova.
Peter Gill's new play Another Door Closed – only an hour and 15 minutes long, and performed in the small Ustinov Studio – is on paper the most modest item in Peter Hall's 2009 season at the Theatre Royal Bath. Actually, it's the most radical. It's not flawless: it opens with a self-conscious exchange in which the elliptical dialogue begins to sound like a tongue-twister; it hammers home its experimental credentials with woodpecker persistence. Yet as it slowly unfurls, it develops into an extraordinary study of concealment. It does so in a manner which has Gill's fingerprints as writer and director all over it. The stage is bare, though when the lighting changes, an expanse of prim floral wallpaper takes on a carnivorous glare. The movement is deliberate, sometimes dance-like. The action is enigmatic. The dialogue swerves from gnomic beginnings into startling detail. There aren't many dramatists who could get Kunzle cakes, butter muslin and a partiality for fornicating with old ladies into one drama.
Two elderly sisters live in sedate seclusion, or perhaps (the characters are dauntingly called Woman One, Woman Two and Man) in a post-life limbo. Pale and meek, June Watson and Marjorie Yates give both women a frozen composure that is only occasionally disrupted by a tremor. An unheralded visitor – impressive, glowering Sean Chapman – arrives and spills a story about their past. It involves a revered mother, possible marital transgression and, in the most vivid passages of the play, a background involving a houseful of pistols and kimonos, a gipsy-like granny with long lobes and big earrings, and two pampered little females, done up in ribbons and "always escorted home, like girls with a destiny". The women briefly attend and then close the door on what may be fantasy or repressed truth. "Thank you for popping in," beams one of the biddies.
There are flickers of Pinter here – the big threatening bloke, the rich demotic language, the threat over a cup of tea, a domesticity that tips into the sinister. Yet though there's a shared experience – the experience of a new class busting into the spruce world of postwar theatre – Gill's world is crucially different. The male intruder gets his powerful shout all right, but it's women who are the main focus of attention. In that sense, Another Door Closed is a new door opened.