June 12 - October 2

Our Summer Showstopper

Hold onto your hats, and escape to summer’s most irresistible offering. A joyful adventure created to sweep you off your feet. Every soul in this story is looking for someone to love, but their collective cupid-compass is pointing in all the wrong directions. Enter Dolly Levi: architect of the heart. As she plots one love connection, another takes flight when a pair of small-town dreamers flee to NYC to manifest their own destinies. It’s a vibrant dance of showstopping scenes and technicolor characters. Come join them in their quest for happily ever after.

Synopsis

Prepare to be dazzled by Wilder’s sparkling farce about love and class. At the heart of this story - which was the inspiration for the beloved musical Hello, Dolly! - the resourceful Dolly Levi, a professional meddler with a knack for arranging other people’s lives (and she may just uncover a few surprises for herself while she’s at it). When Dolly is called upon to find a wife for infamous curmudgeon Horace Vandergelder, hilarity ensues. Fueled by chaos and mistaken identity, with twists and turns aplenty, The Matchmaker celebrates the delightful messiness of human connection and the notion that everyone deserves a little adventure.

Learn more about playwright and Wisconsin native Thornton Wilder here.

Season Select: The Matchmaker

Portable Prologue: The Matchmaker (Apple Podcasts)

Portable Prologue: The Matchmaker (Spotify)

There’s a particular kind of magic that lives inside The Matchmaker, a kind that doesn’t ask us to escape the world, but instead invites us to re-enter it with open eyes, open hearts and maybe just a bit more daring.

At its center is a woman who has known loss, who understands loneliness, and who nonetheless makes a bold and joyful choice to step back into life. Not cautiously. Not halfway. But fully, exuberantly and with a firm belief that connection is always worth the risk. Dolly doesn’t simply arrange matches; she nudges the world back into motion. She reminds us that joy is not something we wait for, it's something we create.

In bringing this story to life here at American Players Theatre, we’ve leaned into that invitation. This play thrives on theatricality, the delicious rhythm of language, the heightened characters, the near-miss timing, the delight of people just barely missing each other until suddenly, gloriously, they don’t.

And yet, beneath the farce and the fun, there’s something quietly profound. This is a play about choosing to live again. About deciding, even after disappointment or grief, that the world is still worth engaging with. That people are still worth loving. That life, in all its unpredictability, still holds possibility.

There’s a line that echoes through this story: “Isn’t the world full of wonderful things?” It’s a question, but also a challenge. Can we see the wonder, even when it feels distant? Can we choose delight? Can we, like Dolly, throw the doors open and let life rush back in?

So, we invite you into that choice.

Laugh loudly. Fall a little bit in love with the characters, with the language, with the simple, radical act of people finding each other. Let yourself be swept up in the chaos and the charm. And as you leave, perhaps carry a bit of Dolly’s spirit with you. A willingness to say yes, to reach out, to believe that there are still wonderful things waiting just around the corner.

After all…isn’t the world full of them?

- Brian Cowing, Director and Choreographer of The Matchmaker