Wilder’s wit is timeless in marvelous ‘Matchmaker’ at APT

Lindsay Christians, The Cap Times

No production of “The Matchmaker” put up in the year of Beyonce’s Act III can exist outside the shadow of “Hello, Dolly!”

Watching Thornton Wilder’s wonderfully witty comedy on the hill at American Players Theatre, where it runs through Oct. 2, I felt like the kid who saw “Wicked” before “The Wizard of Oz.”

Blame Jerry Herman, whose faithful musical adaptation of “The Matchmaker” makes every other line sound like a musical cue. When Dolly Levi declares, “I have always been a woman who arranges things,” it strikes an opening chord in my mind. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on” makes my head swivel. Is a dance about to start?

I’m not the only one. Based on the chatter in the seats, if Barbara Streisand (Dolly in the 1969 Oscar-winning film) could be summoned like the Candyman, she’d have instantly joined the opening night crowd.

This blurring of adaptations is part of the lore of “The Matchmaker.” Wilder’s life-affirming tale of a woman who meddles for “profit and pleasure” was based on an 1830s English one-act called “A Day Well Spent,” then an Austrian farce, then a 1938 adaptation by Wilder called “The Merchant of Yonkers.” That one flopped.

With more rewrites, Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” became a bona fide Broadway hit in 1954. Herman’s musical debuted 10 years later.

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