Lend Me A Tenor

One Theatre Company

By Ken Ludwig

http://www.onetheatre.com

 

First seen on Broadway in 1989, Lend Me A Tenor has since been a staple of regional theatres throughout the country.  And for good cause.  Lend Me A Tenor, as the advertising for this specific production rightfully touts, is “a tour de farce”.  Taking place entirely in a bedroom suite in 1934 Cleveland, Tenor is a production of madcap adventure, replete with mistaken identities, vaudevillian gesturing, and 4 separate doors constantly opening and slamming as the characters are carefully choreographed to predictably miss each other, adding to the inanity of the play’s central crisis. 

 

So what is the “crisis”? Lend Me A Tenor tells (or, more accurately in this production, screams) the story of the grand culmination of the Cleveland Grand Opera’s 1934 season, the starring performance of the world’s greatest Italian tenor, Tito, in the company’s final opera, Othello.  Tito (hilariously played by Aaron Hunt) arrives late to the Cleveland hotel, exhausted from the long trip to middle America, coupled with the encumbrance of hours of constant flirting with the train staff.  He is too tired to attend the final dress rehearsal but too strung-out to take a much-needed nap.  To make sure he gets the required sleep, both Tito’s wife Marie (Stephanie Jacobs) and the opera company’s assistant artistic director Max (Matt Dyson) unknowingly give him a separate full dose of sleeping pills.   When Tito is later discovered laying comatose in his bed, an apparent suicide note laying next to him, Max and the president of the opera company, Saunders (Skip Lundby), begin the desperate task of finding a replacement for the deceased Tito, while making sure that the opening night audience members, the opera company’s biggest donors, never find out.  What progresses is a partially-contrived but enthusiastically funny piece of theatrical comedic work.

 

Judging by the huge success this play has received from places as far apart as Broadway to community theatre to high schools, Lend Me A Tenor is nearly impossible to ruin.  One Theatre Company does not disappoint. It’s enjoyable and funny.  But it’s also overdone.  If all a parent does is scream at their kids, the kids just begin to tune their parents out.  Though not to this extreme, the same dynamics occur in this production.  A few characters in Tenor are so overdone that the true humor and silliness of their characters and lines are drowned out.  This happens most noticeably in the characters of Max and Saunders.  They are consistently symbolizing characters that you might instead see as the antagonist in a Saturday morning kid’s program.  Children do not embrace subtlety, but this is a play for adults, and along with all of the mayhem from this show, there still are places where the humor is in the words and double-entendres, and not in the psycho-ness of the characters.  There is too much of Saunders playing more of a mad scientist and not that of an opera president trying to save his theatre. 

 

Nonetheless, there also are some notable performances, especially involving Tito and his fawning women, including Andrea Wielgus, playing Max’s love interest Maggie, and Charlotte Dearborn portraying the opportunistic (i.e., slutty) opera diva Diana.  Add to this the fine performances of  Stephanie Jocobs playing Tito’s wife Marie, Charlotte Dearborn’s uptight president of the opera board, Julia, (picture Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island) and the tres gay bell hop, Jake Saleh.  (who is a tres funny), and you have a funny cast that nearly compensates for the other over-bombastic performances.

 

One Theatre has created an outstanding set that withstands the abuse of continuous door slammings (though a doorknob did pop off the bathroom door near the end of a play) Great costumes also compliment the characters.

 

Earlier in One Theatre’s season I saw The Last Five Years, which had some unfortunate directorial choices. Taking Lend Me A Tenor into account, then, one of the biggest challenges the company has to face in the future is to hone and finesse their directorial skills.  I wish them the best.

 

Rating: Okay (2.5 stars)

 

 

 

Reviewed by Scotty Zacher

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