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LOS ANGELES. — Stars of the Broadway stage dolled up and flooded into Radio City Music Hall on Sunday to face off against each other at the 2017 Tony Awards. Bette Midler, who won for leading Jerry Zaks’ new revival of “Hello, Dolly!”, proved the ultimate showgirl — the music to play her off started and ended, and she still refused to leave the stage, bellowing: “Shut that crap off!” The 71-year-old dynamo delivered the victory speech of the night, riotously offering her thanks to “all of the Tony voters, many of whom I have actually dated,” to a roar of laughter from the rapturous audience.

Calling the show “one of the greatest professional experiences of my life”, she rhapsodised about the “affection” she’s been on the business end of, vamping: “I can’t remember the last time I had so much smoke up my ass, but there is no more room, so thank you.”

Amid a stampede of innumerable thank-yous came a stretch of the speech aimed at producer Scott Rudin, with Bette effusing: “I owe everything to Scott Rudin,” and touting his “tenacity’ and “unerring eye” during the “ride of my life” experience of working on “Hello, Dolly!”

She expressed her gratitude to many of the people who’d worked behind the scenes on the production, including Natasha Katz, whose lighting design “makes me look 30 years younger” — a number Bette swiftly dialed back to possibly “20, but I look okay”.

An orchestral version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, an Irving Berlin number from his 1946 musical “Annie Get Your Gun”, began blaring, but Bette blared more loudly, and continued to do so until the music ran out. During and around that little interlude, Bette called her castmates — including Gavin Creel, who also won a Tony that night, and David Hyde Pierce, who’d been nominated — “the greatest group of clowns I’ve ever encountered”.

As the music went on, Bette also noted that “I had teachers like you do, and way back in the 60s before all this stuff happened,” and thanked a couple of her old instructors before her: ‘Shut that crap off!’ showstopper.

Once the music was over, she collected herself and kept on going: “I just wanna say that ‘revival’ is an interesting word. It means that something is near death and it was brought back to life.”

As she sees it, though, “Hello, Dolly!” — which also won Best Revival of a Musical — “never really went away” and “has been here all along”, down to “our DNA”, where 85-year-old “Jerry Herman’s songs live forever”.

A laundry list of the show’s attributes, from “optimism” to “democracy” to “colour” to “love of life” to “hilarity”, all contribute to its capacity to “lift your spirits in these terrible, terrible times”, in Bette’s view.

By the end of the speech, she was dedicating the award to the actresses who’d preceded her in the role of Dolly Levi, including still-kicking 96-year-old “Carol Channing, who made my life, who was a gift to me”. — dailymail.