The Matchmaker

At The Stanley until February 24, 2019
Tickets from $29 at 604-687-1644 or artsclub.com

Posted February 1, 2019

Taming of the Shrewd. Not only does Dolly Gallagher Levi, a.k.a. The Matchmaker, make matches but she tames the Scrooge-like Yonkers businessman Horace Vandergelder. “Money is like manure”, Dolly tells Horace. It’s no good unless you spread it around.” Like Dickens’ character, Vandergelder turns a new leaf, promotes his clerk Cornelius to his partner in business, gives his blessing to his niece Ermengarde to marry artist Ambrose Kemper and gets himself married. All he wants in a wife, Horace says, are “order, comfort and economy”.  He probably doesn’t get any of that but what he does get is adventure.

There’s no spoiler alert here; from the moment the curtain rises on Drew Facey’s pretty set full of painted swirls and curling arches, we know how it’s going to turn out. We just don’t know how Dolly is going to make it all happen.

The Matchmaker began in 1835 as A Day Well Spent, a one-act farce, before being re-written as a full-length play in 1842 by Austrian playwright, Johann Nestroy. Almost a hundred years passed before American writer Thornton Wilder adapted the play in 1938, calling it The Merchant of Yonkers. Fifteen years later, at the urging of director Tyrone Guthrie, Wilder significantly rewrote the play, shifting the focus from Vandergelder to the widow Dolly Gallagher Levi, previously a minor role. The Matchmaker, as it was now called, took off with Ruth Gordon winning a 1956 Tony nomination for Best Actress and Guthrie winning the Tony for Best Director. The film version came out in 1958 and in 1964, with Carol Channing in the lead, the musical – Hello, Dolly! – premiered , followed in 1969 by the film version of Hello, Dolly! with Barbra Streisand.

Say hello to Nicola Lipman as Dolly in this Arts Club production directed by the newly appointed Artistic  Director Ashlie Corcoran. Lipman, gorgeously rigged out in a green and white ensemble, has a virtuosic sense of comedic timing. Late in the play, Lipman pronounces “Horace” in a manner that is so sly, so cunning, so calculating and so completely hilarious, she needs to say nothing else. You can see the wheels turning as Lipman delivers the outlandish lies that Dolly makes up on the spot especially when she conjures a fictional 19-year-old bride for Vandergelder even as we know Dolly is plotting to marry him herself. Yet for all her character’s manipulations, Lipman shows us Dolly’s heart of gold. She’s in love with love. Well, she’s also in love with gold.

Corcoran brings together an excellent cast of fourteen. In addition to Lipman there are lots of standouts. Ric Reid is solid as gruff and grumpy Vandergelder. Tyrone Savage (as Cornelius) and Daniel Doheny (Barnaby) make a charming pair of hapless innocents in New York who meet the plucky milliner Mrs. Molloy (Naomi Wright) and her nervous-Nellie assistant Minnie (Georgia Beaty). (Mrs. Molloy’s hat shop is a froth of pastels with fabulous ribbon and feather-festooned hats displayed everywhere. It’s a place for chapeau-lovers to happily die in.)

Scott Bellis takes the relatively slight role of Malachi Stack and polishes it until it glows; as always, Bellis is outstanding. His asides, spoken directly to the audience, often with a wink, are some of the most memorable, pithy lines: “Everybody should eavesdrop once in a while. There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.”

Nora McLellan arrives late in the second act as Miss Flora Van Huysen but when McLellan finally turns up, you know she’s in the house: full-voiced, full-bodied, she’s a one-woman armada sailing across the stage, slapping at her tightly-corsetted body with a fan and howling, “The story of my life”.  She’s completely over the top, proud of it, and the opening night audience lapped it up.

The cast is completed by Nadeem Phillip, Jason Sakaki, Munish Sharma, Julie Leung, Tom Pickett and Deborah Williams, outrageous as the scowling maid of Miss Flora Van Huysen.

The Matchmake is farce and everything is pushed as far as it will go – and then pushed even further. Costumes by Drew Facey on Mrs. Molloy, Minnie and Ermengarde are mismatched concoctions of tights, huge bustles, laced bodices and boots that look as if they were made by Vancouver’s most famous bootmaker high on ‘shrooms: 2019 meets 1884, the period in which Wilder sets the play.  A lattice-work screen,  a wardrobe and a table-clothed table provide hiding places for would-be suitors.  There’s lots and lots of comings and goings – the stock-in-trade of farce, some pratfalls and a couple of ridiculous mistaken identities.

It’s fun but more serious theatre-goers might wonder why this play and why now? It was successfully mounted at Stratford with some of the same actors in 2012 so maybe it will do well here? Furthermore, with China, the US and Canada at loggerheads, strife and starvation elsewhere in the world and constant warnings of disastrous global warming, perhaps we need a little escapism in our lives? And the message, sweetly delivered by young Doheny, is worthwhile: we all need a little sitting-at-home comfort mixed with some adventure.

But with most of the remaining 2018-2019 Arts Club season looking ‘soft’, it suggests that the biggest player in the Vancouver theatre scene and possibly the biggest employer of theatre artists in this town, is leaving it to other companies to deliver thought-provoking, hard-hitting theatre. If that’s true, it would be a shame.