THEATER

Thornton Wilder, Sean Murray battle to a draw in Cygnet's fair The Matchmaker

The theater is nothing if it isn't incestuous. Lore has it that there are 37 truly original plays out there-only 37 storylines for the hundreds upon hundreds of scripts cranked out over more than 20 centuries. The Thornton Wilder Society says that Wilder's The Matchmaker, from 1955, takes its indirect origins from 1835's A Day Well Spent and comes directly from the author's own The Merchant of Yonkers, written in 1938.

The Matchmaker is itself the source of the mega-musical Hello, Dolly!, which in 1964 made Carol Channing's career. Seventeen years later, Dolly! would reprise as On the Razzle, a minor hit for Sir Tom Stoppard.

I picked The Matchmaker because it's the current show at Cygnet Theatre and also because it's Wilder, who, for all his virtues, was a little too big for his literary britches sometimes. The Madison, Wis., native was raised in China, served in both world wars, spoke about 412 languages and was bred with an abiding love for classical art and music and literature and dance and poetry and stuff. His plays show that worldly streak, warts and all. They're solid, but their local situations often lose their bite against the author's global sense of mission.

That flaw haunts The Matchmaker the way it does the majority of plays in the theater archive. And try as he might, director Sean Murray can't quite turn this script into the full-on romantic farce Wilder designed it to become. It's not Murray's fault

Farce is tough to mount. Too much embellishment, and you get burlesque; too little, and you may as well be staging a reading. Murray gets this, and he's given a great deal of thought to his requisite bits of business, asides, pratfalls and fits and starts-he employs them only as they're required by the nuances of the script.

This one features crotchety Yonkers moneybags Horace Vandergelder (David Gallagher), who's turned 60 and thinks it's time to get married again. He's in luck (or maybe not), because bullheaded widow Dolly Gallagher Levi (Sandra Ellis-Troy) has decided to snatch Horace for herself. To that end, she futzes up Horace's courtship of Irene Molloy (Amy Biedel), a hat maker who hates hats-and only when the dust settles does everybody in the 12-member cast wind up with the appropriate mate.

Gallagher and Ellis-Troy are right for these roles the way Horace and Dolly are made for each other. The characters are two hard-bitten, opinionated peas in a pod, and their portrayers have built the necessary chemistry. Horace's clerks Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker (Sean Cox and Jason Connors) bust some funny physical moves as Dolly's unwitting foils; without them, the scene in Irene's New York hat shop virtually wouldn't exist.

But, dammit, it's still romantic farce, interminably driven by formulaic chain reactions and busy, predictable subtexts. The archive's bursting at the seams with eerily similar texts. And while Wilder has the equations down, the world-traveled pontificator in him spoils Murray's fun almost every time the action crescendos. Homespun philosophies like “one vice at a time” and “I don't know where money has gone to these days; it's in hiding!” hardly substitute as punch lines, something this show needs more than anything else.

This Matchmaker has a lot to like-and as you take in set designer Sean Fanning's delicious backdrops and Jeanne Reith's always-on-the-money sartorials, I sincerely hope you have a wonderful time. If you do, though, it's a cinch you've had it before, and with a lot more belly-laughs to boot.

This review is based on the opening-night performance of March 3. The Matchmaker runs through April 8 at Cygnet Theatre, 6663 El Cajon Blvd., College Area. $17-$32. 619-337-1525.

Sweet Jesus

Altar Boyz, the Broadway/San Diego musical entry from the Christian vocal quintet of the same name, opened Tuesday, March 6, at downtown's Civic Theatre following a few days of local appearances by the cast. The guys are young and smart and hip and slick and bustin' out all over (or at least they were when I saw the piece in L.A.)-but if you went to any of the preview events down here, you've seen the show.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan and Abraham mean well as they sing in razor-sharp harmony about things like abstinence, loyalty, the power of prayer and sectarianism; one funny number features Mark (Ryan J. Ratliff) as an ardent Roman Catholic who recounts the forcible shaving of his body hair by a roving gang of Episcopalian thugs. But the songs never make it past the coat of syrup and sugar that ensnares them-the topics are bathed in a vaguely escapist, Jesus-will-make-it-right-in-the-end rhetoric. With all due respect to the Head of central casting, this thing is too sweet for its own good.

Altar Boyz runs through March 11 at the Civic

Theatre, 202 B St., Downtown. $17-$53. 619-564-3000.

Write to marty@SDcitybeat.com and editor@SDcitybeat.com.