Photo Flash: Yes New York, it's Really Him! Santino Fontana Joins HELLO, DOLLY!

Tony Award nominee Santino Fontana, "one of the most promising young actors to emerge in the New York Theater in recent years" (The New York Times), has stepped into the role of Cornelius Hackl in the most successful and beloved Broadway production of the year, the Tony Award-winning Best Musical Revival, Hello, Dolly!. Fontana, filling in forGavin Creel, who won a 2017 Tony Award for the role, joined the company for a limited time beginning this past Tuesday, March 13. Creel will be out of the show during this time as he recovers from back surgery.

This production of Michael Stewart's and Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly!, winner of four 2017 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical, remains one of the most coveted tickets of the year, with audiences rushing to see the "historic event" (Rolling Stone) that has left "tears on the cheeks of critics" (The Washington Post). This production's history-making run broke the record for best first day of ticket sales in Broadway history, holds the record for the largest pre-performance advance sales in Broadway history, broke the box office record at the Shubert Theatre twelve times, and shattered The Shubert Organization's all-time-record ten times.

Directed by four-time Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Tony Award winner Warren Carlyle, Hello, Dolly! began performances on Broadway on March 15, 2017, and officially opened on Thursday, April 20, 2017.

This Hello, Dolly!, the first new production of the classic musical (based on Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker) to appear on Broadway since it opened more than fifty years ago, pays tribute to the work of its original director/ choreographer Gower Champion, which has been hailed both then and now as one of the greatest stagings in musical theater history.

Hello, Dolly! currently stars two-time Tony Award winner Bernadette Peters as Dolly Gallagher Levi and four-time Tony nominee Victor Garber as Horace Vandergelder. The cast also features two-time Tony nominee Kate Baldwin as Irene Malloy, Olivier Award nominee Charlie Stemp as Barnaby Tucker, Molly Griggs as Minnie Fay, Will Burton as Ambrose Kemper, Melanie Moore as Ermengarde, Jennifer Simard as Ernestina, and Kevin Ligon as Rudolph.

The first national tour of Hello, Dolly! kicks off this October in the Connor Palace at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, Ohio, led by Tony Award-winning legend Betty Buckley.

Photo Credit: Timmy Blupé