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.
Everyone in “The Matchmaker” has a justification for bad behavior, often expounded in marvelously conversational asides that, in several cases, became songs in “Dolly” and, in all cases, recall Shakespearean comedy. Some address morality, as when Vandergelder’s sardonic sidekick, Malachi Stack — one of several characters cut from the musical — urges us to “nurse one vice” in our bosom, lest we make vices out of our virtues by default. But more address money, and its connection to happiness that both realists and romantics had better accept. “The surest way to keep us out of harm is to give us the four or five human pleasures that are our right in the world,” Dolly says near the end. “And that takes a little money.”
If those asides sound folksy or cutesy, they certainly could be in less expert hands than Williamson’s and Rhoads’s; a married couple in real life, they are all about the action, not the ingratiation. In any case, Wilder’s theatrical temperament is so craftily unshowy that its intellectual power never interrupts our enjoyment. His hospitality slips its wisdom to you like hard candies. Even the farce is philosophical.
McCallum’s production, which plays in repertory with “The Comedy of Errors” through Aug. 3, makes the most of those moments. The actors, especially Williamson, Howell and, as Stack, Sean McNall, bring a lovely double consciousness to their characterizations, as if they are in the play and, at the same time, beyond it. As always with Wilder, that doubleness creates depth. When Irene demands that Cornelius and his young co-worker, Barnaby Tucker (Tyler Bey), sing to prove they are “interested” and “lively,” the mood turns hushed as the men respond with the highly unlikely “Tenting Tonight.” It’s a song about homesickness and loss among Civil War soldiers — the Civil War being less than 20 years past in the characters’ memory.
The play’s giddier elements are not quite as successful under the tent; it’s hard to slam doors when there are no doors. That’s fine: We have the musical, with its stageful of singing and dancing, for that. On the other hand, “Hello, Dolly!” is not as emotionally affecting as “The Matchmaker.” Even aside from some of its balder rejiggerings — the fake Ernestina Simple becomes the real Ernestina Money — the musical has a narrower spectrum of tonalities, and its shift in theme, prioritizing the love story over the money story, leaves it with a wobble. Wilder’s construction, however light-fingered it may seem, is rock-solid.
So too is the construction of the festival’s new theater, which was visible on a hillside from my seat under the tent. Earlier in the day, McCallum, who is also the company’s artistic director, took some visitors on a tour of the site, where the contrast between the huge framing braces and the airy, undulant roof made it seem almost geological: a hill made of timber. Designed by the architect Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang, it is scheduled to open next summer. What a pleasure it looks to be; surely Wilder would not be surprised to learn that the pleasure comes with a price tag, in this case $30 million.
The Matchmaker
Through Aug. 3 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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