Before Dolly

Reviving Wilder's The Matchmaker

by Steve Vineberg

THE MATCHMAKER By Thornton Wilder. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Sets designed by James Noone. Costumes by Michael Krass. Lighting by Kenneth Posner. Music by Mark Bennett. With Andrea Martin, Lewis J. Stadlen, Adam Trese, Kate Burton, Christopher Fitzgerald, Katie MacNichol, Marian Seldes, Adrienne Gould, Michael Rubinstein, and MichaelJohn McGann. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, through July 19.

Thornton Wilder wrote his comedy The Matchmaker in 1955, and it was a cross-country hit. The original star, Ruth Gordon, toured for several years in the role of the meddling widow Dolly Levi, who sets her own cap for her client, the well-to-do Yonkers hay-and-feed merchant Horace Vendergelder. (There was a movie version shortly afterward, starring Shirley Booth.) But The Matchmaker has been eclipsed in the last several decades by the musical version, Hello, Dolly! -- which was, of course, a much bigger hit.

Nicholas Martin's revival of Wilder's play at Williamstown is the only one I've ever seen. The first thing you notice about it is that it feels like a musical, with farce scenes rigged up like chorus numbers and soliloquies substituting for ballads. This effect is enhanced, inevitably, by our familiarity with Hello, Dolly!, since Jerry Herman spun almost all of his songs off bits of Wilder's dialogue. Therefore seeing the Wilder version of the material is rather unsatisfying: you feel you're looking at a blueprint, even if (like me) you're not a fan of Hello, Dolly! Wilder can't be blamed for the way his comedy has been brought to a neither-fish-nor-fowl state. It's not much of a play, it's true, and it goes on way too long, but I suspect it was more fun to watch before Jerry Herman got at it.

Martin dedicates his production to the straw-hat theater circuit of the 1880s (the era during which the play is set), and his concept -- a clever one -- involves live music, footlights for the soliloquies, and an old-fashioned use of the proscenium arch to frame the action. A company of 18 frisk gamely through the show, which has a lot more spirit than style.

In look, the Williamstown Matchmaker is considerably more rough-hewn than Martin's concept ought to allow for. James Noone's sets have lovely curlicues, like a reflecting-glass alcove in the last act, but they seem unfinished, and though I appreciate the demands on a designer to produce four different sets to re-create a show concocted for an old-style Broadway house, perhaps the entire enterprise should have been approached on a smaller scale. The staging of the farce scenes in the second half is clumsy, as if they'd been assembled at the last minute. The only visual collaborator whose contribution doesn't feel rushed is the costume designer, Michael Krass, who's dressed the actors magnificently -- the women especially.

What drew me to the production above all was the chance to see Andrea Martin, one of the funniest performers on the planet, as Dolly. But though she has some delightful moments and the kind of braying laugh that rings in your head for days afterward, the role is no gift to her. It's a heavy, horsy part, and her scenes with Lewis J. Stadlen's misanthropic Vandergelder seem tired even in the conception. One of the treasured theatrical memories of my college years was seeing Stadlen as Groucho Marx in the musical Minnie's Boys, so when he invoked Groucho in his opening scene (salted with a little Walter Matthau, the Horace of the Hello, Dolly! film), I settled back for a great time. But the impersonation wears thin -- I kept waiting for him to refresh the role with something else, and he never does.

What happens is that the younger performers take over, and they're so fresh that they're able to fuel almost the entire evening. Adam Trese, an actor whose work I've admired on TV (Law and Order) and in movies (Palookaville), is Vandergelder's chief clerk, Cornelius Hackl, who decides that at (a very young) 33 it's high time he embarked on a New York adventure. He falls in love with a feisty milliner, Irene Molloy, who's played by the immensely skillful Kate Burton, while her assistant Minnie Fay (Katie MacNichol) steps out with Cornelius's apprentice, Barnaby Tucker. Tucker is played by Christopher Fitzgerald, who made an indelible impression as Spit in Williamstown's Dead End last summer; here, in a completely different key, he's just as effective. His ebullient performance is like an extended cartwheel; he walks off with the show.

The combination of Adrienne Gould (who looks like a very young Geraldine Chaplin) as Horace's hysteria-prone niece Ermengarde and the sweetly relaxed Michael Rubinstein as her patient suitor Ambrose is also a winning one. These half-dozen performers seem to have all the best scenes in the show. (Act two, which is constructed around the clerks and the milliners, is the easy high point of the evening.) They also embody director Martin's straw-hat concept. Flying by the seat of their pants, they keep the lumbering show in motion.