To a certain extent, bedroom farces are all the same. Ken
Ludwig’s 1986 play Lend Me a Tenor has, over the years and productions,
proven no exception. There are the characteristic slamming of doors,
mistaken identity, brash women whose attempts at control leave their men dazed
and confused, and, naturally, the eccentric foreigner. Yet in this modern
era of theater, when the respective wells of dramatic and comedic originality
have long run dry, the question at hand is whether the public is ready to
embrace cliche for the good fun that it is. The raucous laughs at the
production I attended at the Paper Mill Playhouse (which runs through March
10th) can establish that the public must be as ready as they will ever be.
The innuendo-laden play is set
in a 1934 Cleveland hotel room (designed, admirably, by Tony-winner John Lee
Beatty) temporarily occupied by the Cleveland Opera Company’s general manager,
Saunders (Michael Kostroff, though it might as well have been Jon Lovitz) and
his nebbishy assistant, Max (David Josefsberg). Their fury (in
Saunders’ case) and hand-wringing (in Max’s) are well placed--opera superstar
Tito Morelli (John Treacy Egan) is late for rehearsal for the Opera Company’s
special production of Otello. When the drunken womanizer arrives,
protective wife in tow, hilarity (what else?) is bound to ensue. What follows is a comedy of mistaken
identity, blackface, and music, marked by significant intelligence and mild
ridiculousness.
Josefsberg and Egan (who played Max Bialystock
in The Producers on Broadway for a stretch) sing well, and their operatic pipes are put to good use in a few of
the scenes in which the formulaic, rigid tradition of the opera is
lampooned. Performances are common in
this play, and the female leads—vapid, blonde, and whitewashed—go gaga for
them. Opera, apparently, is the ultimate
aphrodisiac for a Clevelander, and Max’s would-be fiancée (Jill Paice), who is
also Saunders’ daughter, can’t resist Morelli.
His corpulent frame, which she describes, with a sigh of lust, “dripping
with sweat,” seems not even an obstacle that must be overcome, but an added
benefit in addition to Morelli’s tenor voice, powerful enough (thanks to Egan)
to qualify as a title character. Voice
is key in this production, second only to slapstick comedy. The comic chops of the actors in Tenor are significant, too, and none who
see one of the few remaining performances of this usual slam dunk by the Paper
Mill will leave disappointed. The twists
and turns of the story, encompassed by Max and Saunders’ desperate attempts to
control Morelli, are joyfully funny if not brilliantly witty, and altogether
worth seeing. There is nothing wrong
with heavily physical comedy, and Lend Me
A Tenor is among the most hilariously physical pieces of stage comedy written
in the past thirty years.
Such does Lend
Me A Tenor function, through playful parody and fast-paced entrance and
exit. This has much in common with the
way similar farces such as Marc Camoletti’s Boeing-Boeing—which,
incidentally, played at Paper Mill last year—treats an uncomfortable situation
which must be rectified through trickery and cunning. In a way, this format may have been invented
by comedians like the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges in the golden age of
cinema, but the bedroom farce has no golden age, which is part of its
appeal. One written now might share
characteristics with one written fifty years ago, but it would be hard to find
a viewer who would care. Comedy is
timeless, and the racy farce is an offshoot guaranteed to remain just as
prevalent years from now as it was years ago.
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