‘The Matchmaker’ Review: Before ‘Hello, Dolly!’ She Was Just Dolly

Though Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed play “The Matchmaker” is not a musical, it’s nevertheless a great pleasure for musical theater lovers. That’s only partly because so much of its dialogue sounds unexpectedly familiar if you know “Hello, Dolly!” — the 1964 blockbuster built on its bones. Lines that the songwriter Jerry Herman turned into lyrics, barely having to alter a word, keep popping up in Wilder’s script like old friends at a crowded party.

“I am a woman who arranges things,” says Dolly Levi, the good-hearted widow who’s up in everyone’s business. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on,” says Cornelius Hackl, the 38-year-old Yonkers clerk who devises a plan for adventure in New York City. “This summer we’ll be wearing ribbons down our backs,” says Irene Molloy, the milliner he falls in love with there.

But even beyond the spark of recognition that has you humming along with the script, “The Matchmaker,” now enjoying a fine revival at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y., is a musical lover’s delight, besotted with song. Wilder frequently calls for his characters to sing and dance to popular favorites of the period, roughly the 1880s. “The Sidewalks of New York,” the “Les Patineurs” waltz and others decorate and turn the plot while also dramatizing the play’s central theme: the necessity of engaging in the culture of one’s time.

This production, directed with high spirits by Davis McCallum, ups the musical ante. Beneath the festival’s open-sided tent in a dell on the grounds of a former golf course, a three-piece band (fiddle, banjo, accordion) plays on a platform above the action. The Hudson Valley setting is neatly invoked at the start by a poem Wilder wrote for “The Merchant of Yonkers” — a “Matchmaker” predecessor — set charmingly to music by Alex Bechtel. “The Map of New York,” another Bechtel song, is the aural equivalent of sepia rotogravure.

But the play is hardly old-fashioned — or to put it another way, it’s eternal. (Wilder, the author of “Our Town,” is always interested in the eternities.) No surprise there; the story has a provenance going back via England and Germany to the Greeks and Romans. Dolly (Nance Williamson, looking a bit like Bette Midler) is a jollier version of the parasite character of ancient comedy, who through flattery and persistence attains a place at the rich man’s table. In this case, the rich man is Horace Vandergelder (Kurt Rhoads), a Yonkers merchant whose half-million dollars, hoarded and fondled but otherwise never touched, do nothing for the world.

Though Dolly finagles to land Vandergelder and cure his miserliness, you understand from the start that she is not meddling merely for her own gain. She also seeks to match the impoverished Cornelius (Carl Howell) to the widowed Irene (Helen Cespedes), and to marry Vandergelder’s niece (Anvita Gattani) to a painter (Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook) whom the blowhard merchant derides as unpromising. (“You artists produce something nobody needs at any time,” he thunders.) If Dolly must bend the truth to reach these ends — she invents a young woman named Ernestina Simple, then makes her disappear opportunely — she does so in part, as she explains with good cheer, because life should be exciting and people must live in it.