Tom McCamus, Andrew Gillies, Chick Reid (9/11 The Matchmaker)
Excerpt from Beyond the Footlights 9/14/11: Tom McCamus
Casting begins for Festival’s 60th season
September 14, 2011
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has begun to confirm casting for its 60th season and is pleased to announce the return of the following actors: Kyle Blair, James Blendick, Ben Carlson, Juan Chioran, Cynthia Dale, Deborah Hay, Tom McCamus, Seana McKenna, Lucy Peacock, Tom Rooney and Mike Shara. “I am delighted to welcome all these superbly talented performers back to our stages,” says Artistic Director Des McAnuff.
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Seana McKenna and Tom McCamus join forces in a lighter love affair
After his moving portrayal of Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath and his masterful turn as Master Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Tom McCamus will play the leading roles of Horace Vandergelder in The Matchmaker and Iachimo in Cymbeline. Last season, Mr. McCamus delighted audiences in the deliciously evil roles of Captain Hook in Peter Pan and Le Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons. In 11 seasons at Stratford, he has played a vast number of leading roles in such productions as Three Sisters, Bartholomew Fair, An Ideal Husband, The Threepenny Opera, Camelot, Waiting for Godot and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. After her triumphant turn as Richard III, Seana McKenna will make a welcome return to comedy, playing Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker. Stratford audiences will remember Ms McKenna’s lighter side from such productions as Private Lives, Present Laughter, Noises Off and London Assurance - and will be delighted to see her reunited with Mr. McCamus after their sizzling performances in Dangerous Liaisons.
© Beyond the Footlights
Excerpt from Toronto Sun 10/18/11: Tom McCamus
More Stratford 2012 shows set
By John Coulbourn ,QMI Agency First posted: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 01:54 PM
TORONTO - The Stratford Festival has put some more flesh on the bones of the 2012 season announced earlier this summer. According to announcements made Tuesday, the roster for the fest’s 60th season reads as follows:
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•Condlin is also cast in Chris Abraham’s The Matchmaker, opposite McCamus, McKenna, Shara, Ricketts and Wyn Davies in a cast that also includes Sky Brandon and Andrea Runge.
© Toronto Sun
Excerpt from Curtains Up 5/11/12: Tom McCamus, Andrew Gillies, Chick Reid
On at Stratford - Brilliant comedy The Matchmaker starts previews
May 11, 2012
The production’s cast includes Tom McCamus as Horace Vandergelder and Seana McKenna as Dolly Gallagher Levi, with Laura Condlln as Irene Malloy, Mike Shara as Cornelius Hackl, Geraint Wyn Davies as Malachi Stack, Skye Brandon as Ambrose Kemper, Josh Epstein as Barnaby Tucker, Nora McLellan as Miss Flora Van Huysen, Cara Ricketts as Ermengarde and Andrea Runge as Minnie Fay.
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Cast (in alphabetical order)
Understudy............................. Alden Adair
Ensemble............................... Simon Bracken
Ambrose Kemper, suitor to Ermengarde.... Skye Brandon
Ensemble............................... Ian D. Clark
Irene Molloy........................... Laura Condlln
August................................. Victor Dolhai
Ensemble............................... Leah Doz
Barnaby Tucker......................... Josh Epstein
Understudy............................. Barb Fulton
Understudy............................. Andrew Gillies
Ensemble............................... Carmen Grant
Understudy............................. Brad Hodder
Ensemble............................... Ruby Joy
Gypsy Musician......................... Robert King
Horace Vandergelder.................... Tom McCamus
Understudy............................. Lorena Mackenzie
Dolly Gallagher Levi................... Seana McKenna
Miss Flora Van Huysen.................. Nora McLellan
Gertrude, Cook......................... Chick Reid
Ermengarde............................. Cara Ricketts
Minnie Fay............................. Andrea Runge
Cornelius Hackl........................ Mike Shara
Ensemble............................... Brian Tree
Joe Scanlon, Rudolph, Cabman........... John Vickery
Malachi Stack.......................... Geraint Wyn Davies
© Curtains Up
Excerpt from Broadway World 5/12/12: Tom McCamus
THE MATCHMAKER Begins Previews at Stratford Shakespeare Festival May 12
Hilarity and hijinks ensue as the characters in Thornton Wilder’s romantic comedy The Matchmaker. Head to New York for adventure and find love instead. The production, directed by Chris Abrahamand set in the opulence of the Victorian period, begins previews for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Festival Theatre on May 12.
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The production’s cast includes Tom McCamus as Horace Vandergelder and Seana McKenna as Dolly Gallagher Levi, with Laura Condlln as Irene Malloy, Mike Shara as Cornelius Hackl, Geraint Wyn Davies as Malachi Stack, Skye Brandon as Ambrose Kemper, Josh Epstein as Barnaby Tucker, Nora McLellan as Miss Flora Van Huysen, Cara Ricketts as Ermengarde and Andrea Runge as Minnie Fay.
© Broadway World
Excerpt from The Record 5/18/12: Tom McCamus
Stratford Shakespeare Festival celebrates 60th anniversary
Robert Reid, Record staff Fri May 18 2012
STRATFORD - Saying goodbye a year early, Des McAnuff is leaving the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in capable hands. Ironically, his last season, which coincides with the festival’s 60th anniversary, barely reflects its namesake. McAnuff lowers the curtain on five seasons as artistic director of North America’s premiere, classical, repertory theatre with only three Shakespearean plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V and Cymbeline.
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After directing two Canadian plays - Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again and John Mighton’s The Little Years - Chris Abraham returns to direct Tom McCamus and Sean McKenna in The Matchmaker, also featuring Geraint Wyn Davies. “I love this play,” McAnuff asserts of Thornton Wilder’s romantic comedy. “It has great heart which is the perfect salve for these troubled times.”
© The Record
Excerpt from London Free Press 5/25/12: Tom McCamus
Play on THEATRE: Summer theatre troupes are primed to entertain region’s fair weather fans
By JOE BELANGER Last Updated: May 25, 2012 6:17pm
Stage curtains are rising across Southwestern Ontario as the summer theatre season begins, starting with the grand daddy of them all, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
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Saturday at the Festival, Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, directed by Chris Abraham and starring Tom McCamus as Horace and Seana McKenna as Dolly Levi.
© London Free Press
Excerpt from Toronto.com 6/4/12: Tom McCamus, Chick Reid (Nicole Carter in "Blood Ties")
Review: Stratford’s Matchmaker is a matchless production
By Richard Ouzounian Jun 04, 2012
Happiness is The Matchmaker. The Thornton Wilder comedy that ended the opening week of the Stratford season on Saturday night provides sheer delight, absolute bliss, boundless merriment and heartfelt joy.
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The leads are amazing, but that’s to be expected. The supporting cast are gems, but that’s not strange either. What makes this show sparkle is the fact that even the smallest roles are played by the likes of Jon Vickery, Chick Reid, Robert King, Brian Tree and Victor Dolhai, each and every one of them giving full comic value to their moments in the sun.
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At the other end of the see-saw - and just as delicious - is Tom McCamus as the “old wolf trap,” Vandegelder. A tough Yankee cracker version of Scrooge, his voice, his demeanour, his very walk are all different from anything we’ve ever seen him do before and it’s all pure comic gold.
© Toronto.com
Excerpt from Stratford Beacon 6/4/12: Tom McCamus
Review: Matchmaker a perfect match
By Declan Kelly Monday, June 4, 2012 8:50:51 EDT AM
But in giving "The Matchmaker" its Stratford debut, director Chris Abraham and his skilled cast prove they are more than up to the task of wringing maximum resonance from the many insights Wilder has sprinkled throughout the countless moments of two-dimensional merriment.
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Tom McCamus captures the stuffy, bucolic bluster of miserly merchant Horace Vandergelder with ease, particularly his inability to devote as much attention to his heartstrings as he does his purse-strings.
Excerpt from London Free Press 6/4/12: Tom McCamus
Set mars perfect match
By JOHN COULBOURN, QMI Agency Last Updated: June 4, 2012 4:12pm
Turns out, however, that in pairing director Chris Abraham, best known for "serious" stage work like Antigone and Eternal Hydra, with Thornton Wilder's script for The Matchmaker, the Stratford Festival has created a marriage made in heaven.
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McKenna is superbly understated as the subtly meddlesome matchmaker, espousing love and art and all things good, while McCamus brings just the right touch of lovability to his portrayal of the curmudgeonly old tycoon.
© London Free Press
Excerpt from Canada.com 6/4/12: Tom McCamus
Stratford plays The Matchmaker: Fest hits the mark this year with two Shakespearean classics and a delirious revival of a Thornton Wilder classic.
By Jamie Portman, June 4, 2012
And the festival's exuberant revival of Thornton Wilder's modern classic, The Matchmaker, qualifies as one of the funniest productions yet mounted at Stratford.
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Still there is no denying the pleasure of watching the magical Seana Mckenna insinuate her way into our affections with her portrayal of that consummate manipulator - Dolly Gallagher Levi. And she has a worthy comedic foil in Tom McCamus - crotchety, crusty and curmudgeonly, mutton-chop whiskers quivering with rage over the follies of the world, as the wife-hunting Yonkers merchant, Horace Vandergelder. The way in which McKenna's cunning but good-hearted Dolly manoeuvres McCamus's volatile Horace into her own permanent embrace makes for one of theatre's most memorable comic courtships. In one of his great asides to the audience, McManus's Horace growls that there's nothing like a woman to make a fool of a man. True, and what fun to see it happen on stage.
© Canada.com
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail 6/4/12: Tom McCamus
The Matchmaker: Silly, simple story is a masterpiece
J. Kelly Nestruck The Globe and Mail Published Monday, Jun. 04 2012, 3:21 PM EDT
With the Internet and online dating still a good century away, Horace, played by Tom McCamus swaddled in formidable mutton chops, has hired a crafty matchmaker named Dolly Levi (Seana McKenna) to help him find a second wife while avoiding becoming a fool. Little does he know that he’s being played for one, with Dolly’s long, exhaustive search having already ended and a wife all picked out for him: herself.
© The Globe and Mail
Excerpt from The American Conservative 6/4/12: Tom McCamus
A Match Made In Heaven: The Matchmaker at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
By Noah Millman • June 4, 2012, 9:35 PM
The current Stratford production of The Matchmaker is a thorough delight. Literally every performer in the cast is in top form. Tom McCamus shows us only a whisker of his usual wolfish sex appeal as Horace Vandergelder - just enough so we have some expectation that Dolly Levi might see something in him besides a bag of money.
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I would still heartily recommend the movie as a companion to the stage production, though I thought Ms. McKenna and Mr. McCamus blew Shirley Booth and Paul Ford out of the water with their performances.
© The American Conservative
Excerpt from Chatham This Week 6/6/12: Tom McCamus
Matchmaker a fine piece of entertainment
By Karen Robinet, Chatham This Week Wednesday, June 6, 2012 2:10:13 EDT PM
And, Tom McCamus is delightful as the penny-pinching pseudo-philosopher who, having banked the last dollar of his first half-million, is now in the market for a wife. Of course a wife is not really a wife, Horace opines; she is rather an elevated housekeeper empowered with a slightly higher sense of ownership toward the household duties.
© Chatham This Week
Excerpt from The National Post 6/8/12: Tom McCamus, Chick Reid (Nicole Carter in "Blood Ties")
Stratford review: The Matchmaker is a play well spent
Robert Cushman | June 8, 2012 4:45 PM ET
Unless I’m forgetting something, Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, at the Stratford Festival, is the richest and funniest production of a farce that I’ve ever seen in a Canadian theatre.
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Tom McCamus, mutton-chopped and lobster-voiced, makes a crackling Vandergelder whose crackle gets more desperately effective the more hemmed-in he becomes.
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Chick Reid inhabits two worlds of her own as a pair of selectively deaf domestics, one at each end of the play; and the restaurant, at which I want a reservation, is superbly staffed at every level.
© National Post
Excerpt from New Hamburg Independent 6/12/12: Tom McCamus
Stratford Festival review, a look at Thorton Wilder’s The Matchmaker
JT Jordan Tuesday, June, 12, 2012 - 11:11:05 AM
Abraham has been handed The Festival’s “A-list” of actors. Seana McKenna as a warm, conniving Dolly Gallagher, Tom McCamus as a blustering Horace Vandergelder and Geraint Wyn Davies as his drunken sidekick all bring out fresh personae unlike any they have done before. Mike Shara as Cornelius, and Josh Epstein as Barnaby play a mix of innocence and physical comedy with ease. Nora McLellan steals the second act as dramatic Flora Van Huysen and even the secondary roles are filled by luminaries such as Chick Reid and John Vickery.
© New Hamburg Independent
Excerpt from North London Beacon 6/14/12: Tom McCamus
Summer Theatre Reviews … Stratford
by northlondonbeacon Posted on June 14, 2012 at 12:00 am
I never knew that Thornton Wilder worked at Stratford with Tyrone Guthrie on the beginnings of his hit comedy “The Matchmaker”, but I’m pleased that the finished work was realized on the Festival Stage this season.
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The cast is uniformly excellent, with Tom McCamus playing a very rich merchant who is helpless to resist a matchmaker named Dolly Levi. It was the precursor to “Hello Dolly”, but it remains terrific comic theatre without any music to get in the way. McCamus makes Horace Vandergelder an irascible but reformable curmudgeon, while Seanna McKenna pulls all the right strings as the widow who wants to make a match for herself. There is genuine chemistry between these two veteran Stratford stars, and the other two love stories rise to great fun and some physical comedy that keeps the audience laughing, particularly in the Millinery shop.
© North London Beacon
Excerpt from Ottawa Community News 6/19/12: Tom McCamus
It’s a Matchmaker not made in heaven
Jun 19, 2012
Similarly, when Dolly (a wisely economical Seana McKenna) and Horace Vandergelder (a boisterous Tom McCamus) find themselves in the elegant Harmonia Gardens, with a whole tribe of antic waiters to create havoc, things get exponentially silly.
© Ottawa Community News
Excerpt from Gleeditions 7/12: Tom McCamus
American Farce Ages Like Fine Wine
In search of a second wife, a wealthy but tight-fisted merchant named Horace Vandergelder (played by Tom McCamus) hires a comically sly matchmaker Dolly Levi (Seana McKenna) to find him a mate.
© Gleeditions
Excerpt from The Canadian Jewish News 7/12/12: Tom McCamus
Amazing, typically Stratford
Tom McCamus is strong and effectively exaggerated as the vain, stuffy Vandergelder.
© Canadian Jewish News
Excerpt from Intrepid Travelogue 7/23/12: Tom McCamus
‘The Matchmaker’ at Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2012
Thornton Wilder’s farce The Matchmaker is perhaps best known, to the extent it is known at all these days, as the progenitor of the musical smash Hello Dolly. It would be nice if the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s current production changes all that.
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It helps that he is blessed with a sterling cast who can rise to the challenge. Tom McCamus, who excels in more saturnine roles, is downright hilarious as Horace, a pompous yet endearing twit of man whose masculine assuredness is no match for a woman’s wiles.
© Intrepid Travelogue
Excerpt from Ontario Arts Review 8/4/12: Tom McCamus
“The Matchmaker”, fails to ignite this critic
Review by Danny Gaisin August 4, 2012
As her client cum intended, Tom McCamus doesn’t cut it. He has some great lines, such as ‘the best part of marriage is fighting’; and offers a logic that offends but like Machiavelli - works. Still, this writer found his personality so implausible that one can’t imagine his being even slightly successful in business and certainly displays a total absence of any social charm. Retain customers- not likely; keep staff; never; be a potential catch; not even if he was a Vanderbilt instead of a Vandergelden!
© Ontario Arts Review
Excerpt from Theater Mania 8/6/12: Tom McCamus
Six Shows to See at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
By Matt Windman • Aug 6, 2012 • Toronto
As the matchmaker herself, Dolly Levi, Seana McKenna is a busybody full of pep, while Tom McCamus brings a blustering personality to the aging and foolish store owner Horace Vandegelder, who gets caught in Dolly's irresistible trap.
© Theater Mania
Excerpt from Observer Today 8/25/12: Tom McCamus
Stratford Shakespeare Festival
August 25, 2012 By ROBERT W. PLYLER , The OBSERVER
Tom McCamus was inspired as the penurious Vandergelder. Indeed if the program didn't say it was McCamus under the bushy sideburns and wild white hair, I would not have guessed it.
© Observer Today
Excerpt from New York Times 8/27/12: TOm McCamus
Adventure as a Cure for Ailing Love Lives
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD Published: August 26, 2012
Tom McCamus, his bristles of whiskers amusingly signifying his prickly personality, plays the man Dolly’s commissioned to find a wife for: the wealthy shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder, a widower determined to take a new wife without going to any great expenditure, emotional or monetary.
© New York Times