| re: Have you ever seen Tom Stoppard's take on the same story? | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 03:55 pm EDT 10/12/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Have you ever seen Tom Stoppard's take on the same story? - JereNYC 11:19 am EDT 10/12/17 | |
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| I don't remember reading that Wilder ever said that about The Matchmaker as opposed to The Merchant of Yonkers. In fact, the role is not notably bigger in the retitled version. The rest of this post is primarily from the notes I wrote for ovrtur on the source material for Hello, Dolly! Easier than to write something new saying the same thing. The Matchmaker was a minimally revised version of Wilder's 1938 comedy The Merchant of Yonkers. (The Matchmaker was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1954. In October 1954, it was produced in London, and it reached Broadway in December 1955.) Some sources state that in The Matchmaker Wilder made substantial changes to the earlier play, but a comparison of the published scripts for both plays reveals that the differences between the two are minimal. In Wilder's introduction to the colection titled 3 Plays, which contained Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker, he described The Matchmaker as "an only slightly modified version of The Merchant of Yonkers." This is accurate. It has also been erroneously stated that Dolly Gallagher Levi was a minor character in The Merchant of Yonkers In fact, the role is approximately the same size as in The Matchmaker. If anything, Dolly in the earlier play may have a slightly greater total number of lines, although a few important lines that would later become famous were added for the character in The Matchmaker. It should be evident that Dolly wasn't a minor character in The Merchant of Yonkers by the simple fact that the role was created by Jane Cowl, who was a great star at the time. In the playbill, Cowl's name was above the title and in much larger print than anyone else's, including those of the author and the production's director, the world-famous Max Reinhardt. Wilder had written the role with Ruth Gordon in mind, but she did not play it till the play was revised as The Matchmaker. The Merchant of Yonkers was based on the 1835 English farce A Day Well Spent by John Oxenford, and the 1842 Austrian farce Einen Jux Will er Sich Machen by Johann Nestroy. No counterpart to Dolly appears in those plays. The character was inspired by the character Frosine in Moliere's The Miser. Wilder adapted a brief passage of dialogue from The Miser for use in The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker. |
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| Previous: | re: Have you ever seen Tom Stoppard's take on the same story? - JereNYC 11:19 am EDT 10/12/17 |
| Next: | re: Have you ever seen Tom Stoppard's take on the same story? - Ann 11:27 am EDT 10/12/17 |
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