The largely male audience at Town Hall on Monday night to see Carol Channing perform was overwhelmed by the “Hello, Dolly!” star and gave her a fabulous standing ovation.
“Her hearing and memory were variable, the shtick and timing intact,” one happy fan told me.
Sir Ian McKellen (on his night off from the Cort Theatre repertory of “No Man’s Land” and “Waiting for Godot”), director Sean Mathias and Sandra Bernhard laughed with everyone else when drag queen Justin Vivian Bond, who conducted a Q&A with the legend, started off by asking: “Carol, you’re about to turn 93. Where do you want to be buried?”
A tech glitch caused a voice to come from a screen behind them at the wrong time. Carol, looking shocked, said, “I thought it was God!”
Any time Bond would ask her about something in her past, Channing would say, “How did you know that?”
“I read it in your book,” Bond would reply. “Oh, I haven’t read it yet,” joked Channing, the author of her 2002 autobiography, “Just Lucky I Guess.”