The Matchmaker: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Matchmaker is a play by Thornton Wilder based on an 1842 play by the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy titled Einen Jux will er sich machen. The Matchmaker was itself the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly!, which was made into a 1969 movie.

The Matchmaker is also a 1958 movie of Wilder's play, directed by Joseph Anthony and starring Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine, Paul Ford, and Robert Morse.

The play is a comedy about a widow who brokers marriages, and many other kinds of transactions, in Yonkers, New York (U.S.), around the turn of the 19th century. She sets her cap for a local tradesman who has hired her to find him a wife, and at the end of the play he finally does ask her to marry him.