Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
by Thornton Wilder, directed by Chris Abraham
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 2-October 27, 2012
“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy the ice cream while it's on your plate”, Thornton Wilder
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s success with farce has been hit and miss, but Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker is no ordinary farce and Chris Abraham is no ordinary director. Though pairing a director known for experimental theatre with an old-fashioned chestnut of the American stage may seem odd, it turns out to be a perfect match. Give him an ideal cast and The Matchmaker turns out to be a delight from beginning to end.
The plot derives from Johan Nestroy’s 1842 comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen (itself based on an 1835 English comedy), which Wilder has transplanted from Vienna to New York in the 1880s. (In 1981 Tom Stoppard adapted the same play as On the Razzle.) The story is probably best known as the basis of the Jerry Herman musical Hello, Dolly! (1963), but unless you must have song and dance, Wilder’s play offers a much richer experience.
Horace Vandergelder, a rich merchant in Yonkers, is completely opposed to his daughter Ermengarde’s love for a young artist. Vandergelder himself has plans to marry again and has hired Dolly Levi, a matchmaker, to find him a suitably docile bride, but Dolly has her own plans of marrying into wealth and secretly aids Ermengarde in marrying the artist. Meanwhile, two of Vandergelder’s workers, Cornelius and Barnaby, fed up with his strict ways and seeing only a joyless life ahead, decide to close the shop in his absence and go to New York to have the “adventures” they’ve always dreamt of. The action escalates into a series of disguises and near encounters between Vandergelder and his errant employees culminating in a riotous scene when they all turn up at the same expensive restaurant.
The play is not remotely experimental, unlike Wilder’s Our Town of 1938, except for his allowing various characters to address the audience directly to explain their actions. Abraham, who has directed such challenging works as Anabel Soutar’s Seeds (2012), John Mighton’s The Little Years (2011), Anton Piatigorsky’s Eternal Hydra (2010), Daniel Brooks’ Insomnia (2006), Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2003) and Kristen Thompson’s I, Claudia (2001), would seem to have a mindset opposed to the cosy optimistic world that Wilder posits in this play. In fact, he embraces the play fully perhaps because Wilder has embedded in this tale of innocent young men and their aged wealthy taskmaster a pro-socialist critique of capitalism and hierarchical relationships. In her address to the audience in Act 2, Dolly says, “Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow”. She has set her sights on Vandergelder not just to make her own life more financially comfortable but because she is determined to redistribute his wealth to make Yonkers a better place.
The big surprise, given the seriousness of Abraham’s previous work, is that he proves to be a master in directing farce. The flaw so often at Stratford has been for directors to try to add their own gimmickry to make a comedy funnier but producing the opposite effect. Abraham completely serves the play, finds richness in the characters and paces the action perfectly with suspense mounting with the relentless snowballing of one quid pro quo after the next. Only in Act 2 when he presents Ermengarde’s aunt and her servant as graduates from the Ministry of Silly Walks, does he venture off his admirably straight path, but, except for this, The Matchmaker is one of most lucidly directed comedies seen on the Festival stage in years.
If there is one flaw it is that Abraham, who has never directed on the Festival stage, presents the action as too forward-facing, as if the action were behind a proscenium arch but merely shoved forward onto the Festival’s thrust stage. The clearest indication of this are the direct addresses to the audience where Abraham has a character walk right downstage centre to speak, meaning that only the centre two sections of the auditorium have a proper view. Director familiar with the Festival stage know that centre stage is where to situate monologues so that fewer in the audience have to look at the actor’s back.
This flaw aside, Abraham encourages outstanding performances from the entire cast. Tom McCamus has never been funnier than he is as Horace Vandergelder. He’s gruff, filled with strict conservative ideas about society and relationships, but yet can recognize, eventually, a sound idea after he’s had time to mull it over. This last point is crucial because if Vandergelder is shown as completely unpleasant and intractable, as happened in the Shaw Festival production in 2000, the ending comes out of nowhere. The contrast McCamus plays up between Vandergelder’s irascibility and his desire to make himself appealing to his future bride is hilarious.
Under Abraham’s direction, Sean McKenna as Dolly Levi divests herself of all the histrionic habits she has accrued over the years. The result is one of the freshest and most genuinely amusing performances she’s ever given. McKenna is wonderful at showing Dolly’s daring in going way out on a ledge to invent details about a would-be bride who doesn’t exist. At the same time she is an endearing character because McKenna invests her with a sense of melancholy. Dolly has grown tired of living on her wits and longs for security, even if it comes at the price of having to marry Vandergelder.
Mike Shara and Josh Epstein are well cast as Vandergelder’s two employees, Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker. Shara can convey such a sense of innocence that he makes it completely believable that this 33-year-old man knows nothing about women and has never been kissed. He also displays a real talent for physical comedy. Epstein is very funny as the timid 17-year-old who doesn’t really long for adventure but is swept away by the urgency of Cornelius’ rhetoric.
The female counterparts of Cornelius and Barnaby are Irene Molloy, a milliner, and her assistant Minnie Fay. This is Laura Condlln’s 11th season and it is a pleasure to see her in a major role like Irene on her own. Irene is a complex character, depressed that life seems to be passing her by but still with enough spunk to take charge when Cornelius and Barnaby accidentally give her the chance to change things. As Minnie Fay, Andrea Runge has little to do but act shy and flustered, yet she does that well.
The young lovers Ermengarde and Ambrose are fairly standard comedy types, but Cara Ricketts and Skye Brandon give them a a defiant energy that takes them out of the ordinary. Geraint Wyn Davies plays Malachi Stack, a sly old codger who worms his way into Vandergelder’s employ, and gives us his standard Welsh rogue performance we’ve seen before when he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009. Nora McLellan enlivens the second half of Act 2 with her over-the-top performance as Ermengarde’s eccentric Aunt Flora, who spends her days wallowing in operatic emotions about the tragic story of her love life. John Vickery plays three completely distinct roles but is probably funniest as Rudolph the imperious waiter who can barely tolerate his uninformed patrons.
Santo Loquasto’s set and costumes ably conjure up the Gilded Age in the United States. It is ironic that after the Festival removed the central balcony and staircases from the Festival stage, that Loquasto essentially reconstructs them for his set. One can’t help but think that Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s original design for the Festival stage would have been a far more elegant solution to the design for this play than the awkward tower with staircases that Loquasto has created. The Festival seems so committed to building sets for the Festival stage it has forgotten that Moiseiwitsch’s is so versatile it obviates the need for such excrescences.
People who go to Stratford tend first to see a musical and second to see a play by Shakespeare. That is a good plan given the priorities of the Festival at present, but if you have a chance to add a third show to your schedule, The Matchmaker would be a perfect choice. Like Wilder’s most famous play Our Town, it conveys an inherently optimistic view of humanity. It may be structured as a farce but farces don’t typically have characters with such complexity who engage us so deeply in their struggle for a better life. Chris Abraham masterfully brings out both the humanity and the prodigious humour of this charming play that cannot fail to raise your spirits.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Laura Condlln and Seana McKenna. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2012-06-04
The Matchmaker