The Matchmaker
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- This article is about the play. For other uses, see Matchmaker.
The Matchmaker is a 1955 play by Thornton Wilder.
The play has a long and colorful history. John Oxenford's 1835 A Day Well Spent, a one-act British farce, had been extended into a full-length play entitled Einen Jux will er sich machen by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842. In 1938, Wilder adapted Nestroy's farce into an Americanized comedy entitled The Merchant of Yonkers, which attracted the attention of German director Max Reinhardt, who mounted a Broadway production. It was a dismal failure, running for a mere 39 performances.
Fifteen years later, director Tyrone Guthrie expressed interested in a new production of the play, which Wilder extensively rewrote and rechristened The Matchmaker. The most significant change was the expansion of a previously minor character named Dolly Gallaher Levi, who became the play's centerpiece. A widow who brokers marriages and other transactions in Yonkers, New York at the turn of the 20th Century, she sets her sights on local merchant Horace Vandergelder, who has hired her to find him a wife. After a series of slapstick situations involving mistaken identities, secret rendezvous behind carefully-placed screens, separated lovers, and a trip to night court, everyone finds himself paired with a perfect match.
The play was a success at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London's West End before opening on Broadway with Ruth Gordon in the title role. Her performance earned her a Tony Award nomination as Best Actress; Guthrie won as Best Director. The play enjoyed a run of 486 performances.
The 1958 film version, directed by Joseph Anthony, starred Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine, Paul Ford, and Robert Morse.
In 1964, the play enjoyed yet another incarnation when David Merrick, who had produced the 1955 Broadway production, mounted a hugely successful, Tony Award-winning musical version entitled Hello, Dolly!, with a score by Jerry Herman and starring Carol Channing.
