Loretta Ables Sayre returns to Diamond Head Theatre stage

The late Jimmy Borges had a knack for creating timely song parodies to celebrate his friends’ accomplishments.

Today — the 21st day of September, 2018 — it’s easy to imagine Borges singing out a congratulatory verse:

“Hello, Loretta! This is Jimmy, Loretta! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong!”

That “Loretta” would be Hawaii-born Broadway veteran Loretta Ables Sayre, who’s back on stage at Diamond Head Theatre Friday in the theater company’s season-opening production of “Hello, Dolly!”

Ables Sayre stars in the title role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, a brassy and entrepreneurial widow making her way in the world at the turn of the 20th century as a professional matchmaker, with several careers on the side. As the story opens Dolly has been hired to find an eligible woman for grumpy, wealthy Horace Vandergelder. What Vandergelder doesn’t know is that Dolly has decided to marry him herself.

“This is definitely the biggest, most demanding role I’ve ever done,” Ables Sayre said, during an interview last week. “Except for some big dancing sequences, Dolly is always on stage, all the time.”

ABLES SAYRE’S last appearance at Diamond Head Theatre was in 2015, playing Bloody Mary in “South Pacific” — a reprise of the role she played on Broadway in the highly acclaimed, Tony Award-winning 2008 revival.

One night during the Broadway run, Ables Sayre was visited by another island expat, Hawaii-born Bette Midler. That the two met for the first time on Broadway creates a series of parallels and island connections — though neither of the performers anticipated that at the time.

Midler, who performed at Diamond Head Theatre in her youth, would go on to national stardom as an actor and recording artist. The 2017 Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly” was Midler’s first leading role in a Broadway musical, and she caused a sensation, helping to sell out much of the run. (Midler left the show in January of this year but returned in July for the final weeks of the successful revival.)

All that was years in the future when Midler visited Ables Sayre backstage in 2008.

“She came to see the show, she found out that I was from Hawaii, and she actually came to my dressing room,” Ables Sayre recalled. “We talked for probably half an hour about being from Hawaii.

“We both graduated from Radford High School, and talked about being raised in the area, working in New York, and all things Hawaii that we both missed — how often she comes home — and we both slipped into pidgin.

“That was 10 years ago, and at the time ‘Dolly’ wasn’t on the horizon for either one of us.”

Midler won a Tony for her portrayal of Dolly in 2017.

Hawaii has a long history of “color-blind” casting for Caucasian character roles on the local stage — but Ables Sayre, who is Filipino-American and does much of her work on stage on the mainland, said she never expected to get a shot at “Dolly!”

“I probably would not have been given the opportunity to do this show on the mainland, because it’s historically given to Caucasian women,” she said. “Pearl Bailey did it (with an all-black cast) in the mid-’60s, but it normally goes to Caucasian women — so it wasn’t anything that was on my list of shows to do.

“Had (DHT Artistic Director) John Rampage not given me the opportunity, I would never have been able to sink my teeth into it,” Ables Sayre said. “It’s an incredible blessing for me — and to be able to do it at home.”

THE CHARACTER of Dolly Gallagher Levi is one that Ables Sayre loves and even identifies with, she said.

“She’s outspoken, she has a mind of her own, a raucous sense of humor, she’s just a little on the bawdy side, and she had a husband — she’s now a widow — that absolutely adored her, exactly the way she was. She speaks the truth to me.

“This is a real woman who’s out there trying to make her own way in the world at a time when women weren’t supposed to make their own way in the world.

“There’s this independence and this fire and this passion about her that I really love, and just the whole idea that she’s trying to get people together and trying to end the loneliness in her own life at the same time.”

Going back to 1989, Ables Sayre remembers Tommy Aguilar’s decision to cast her in his production of “Dream Girls” at the Hawaii Theatre.

“That’s basically an African-American experience musical, and on Broadway I would probably never have been called to audition for the show,” Ables Sayre said. “It’s only because of being from Hawaii and being a performer here that these two shows are in my performance experience.”

Ables Sayre first performed with Diamond Head Theatre in 2002, playing a character named Pua Lusa (sound it out) in “You Somebody,” a pidgin musical concocted by Lee Cataluna (a Honolulu Star-Advertiser columnist then writing for the Honolulu Advertiser) and multi-Hoku Award-winner Keola Beamer.

Ables Sayre reprised her portrayal of Pua Lusa when DHT staged “You Somebody” in 2007. That performance helped propel her to Broadway.

Back at Diamond Head Theatre once again, Ables Sayre said she hopes that everyone who sees the show will enjoy it as much as she did when she saw it last year on Broadway.

“I was not expecting the joy that I got from it,” she said.

“Seeing a show like this, which is fantasy and fun and laughter and romance, was such an emotional release. I’m really hoping that we as a cast can bring a modicum of what I felt to the people here.”