Putting the play’s dramatic roots aside, the Broadway production of The Matchmaker was a dream come true for Wilder. The play had a 486-performance Broadway run in 1955–1956, a Wilder Broadway record (150 more performances than Our Town’s 336), followed by a recording-breaking five-month national tour. All this was preceded by a highly successful eight-month engagement on London’s West End and was succeeded in turn by three successful works based on Matchmaker. Its most famous offspring by far was the internationally acclaimed, smash musical Hello, Dolly! (1964), a work that Wilder had no direct role in creating other than giving David Merrick the rights to fashion a musical. The Matchmaker also spawned two films, a 1958 adaptation of the original play with Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, and Shirley MacLaine, and the movie version of Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau.

The Matchmaker was legally embargoed for years at a time to provide an open road for Hello, Dolly! on stage and screen. Since 1972, when the last legal shackle was removed, the play has been available for licensing in the United States and Canada without any holdbacks and has been continuously revived professionally and served as a staple of school and community theater. It has also been produced in some fourteen countries in more than eleven languages. That said, when compared to the enormously popular Our Town and Hello, Dolly!, The Matchmaker is frequently and erroneously referred to by critics as a “rarely produced” work—ironically in tandem with a remark about how The Matchmaker makes them want to break into song.

The road to The Matchmaker’s success was long and rocky, reaching a nadir when its first version, a four-act farce titled The Merchant of Yonkers, proved a flop on Broadway in 1939, closing after only thirty-nine performances. Wilder’s persistence in bringing it to successful fruition attests not only to its inherent strengths from inception, but from the depth of its roots.

The creative cauldron of influences in The Matchmaker extend from Wilder’s childhood relationship with the theater, to his passion for Moliere, farce, and German language and drama, through to his creative partnerships with practitioners whose work he admired and respected. As Wilder noted in his Preface to Three Plays, the foundations of this hydra-headed work were built during his boyhood encounters with the boisterous stock company productions he saw at the Ye Liberty Playhouse in Oakland, California. His youthful fascination with vaudeville and stage comedy led to his voracious reading of plays, his acting in Berkeley High School’s annual vaudeville show, and his spending scores of hours in other theaters, including the University of California Berkeley’s Greek Theatre near his home in the Berkeley Hills.

Early on in the course of his theatrical exploration, Moliere became one of Wilder’s theatrical heroes. His technique is evident in Wilder’s early three-minute plays (1915–1920) and in Queens of France, a one-act play published in 1931 that marked Wilder’s arrival on the national scene as a serious dramatist. “Queens of France was written under l’ombre de Molière” Wilder wrote in 1930.