“It’s not proper!” was a favorite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eax58Njwt0

This video is rather fuzzy, which is too bad; it was a very “sharp” production, set and costume-wise, and maybe a better one can be found.

Stoppard was a favored playwright while we were in college (1970s); AesopSpouse and I were involved in productions of “Jumpers” and “The Real Inspector Hound”. We had a friend who appeared in “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”.
Anyone who hasn’t experienced a Stoppard play should try one – they are surreal but accessible, if you get my meaning.

I agree on Horace and Dolly’s surnames. Were matchmakers common in the U.S. at the start of the 20th century, and if so, were they secular? I have no idea. I think of it in relation to Judaism, but maybe that’s just coincidence in my mind from the “Matchmaker” song in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Which had nothing to do with the 20th century nor the U.S.

I’ve seen ads for matchmakers in the contemporary south in the U.S. and I think I saw a reality TV series based on the occupation.

The manufactured name given Matthau’s character sounds Knickerbocker, not Jewish. The Streisand character’s name sounds Jewish. I think at turn of the century, Yonkers would have been a discrete community surrounded by countryside.

For some reason “Hello Dolly” is set around the turn of the century, and I’m not sure what Yonkers was like then. So, maybe there is no connection. I assumed it was about a Jewish man living among gentiles in a turn of the century, American town, but maybe I assumed that because Streisand and Matthau played the leads in the movie?

And, apparently Tom Stoppard did a different adaptation titled, “On the Razzle.” Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy got a lot of mileage out of his libretto!

Tony Randall (né Aryeh Rosenberg), Dinah Shore (née Frances Rose Shore), and Bea Arthur (née Bernice Frankel) came from families like this. Arthur spent her adolescence on Maryland’s Eastern Shore after her early years in Brooklyn. Randall’s parents were divorced; his upbringing was split between New York and Tulsa. Shore’s family started out in small towns in Tennessee, then decamped to Nashville when she was an adolescent. She moved to New York in her 20s; into her 60s you could detect a slight drawl in her voice.

Michael Kinsley (of The New Republic, Crossfire, and Slate) grew up in the Detroit suburbs. His parents had a strictly small town upbringing. His father’s family lived in a succession of New England towns working as tailors. His mother came from a family that settled in Uniontown, Pa. His grandfather owned a department store there.