THEATER REVIEW: 'Lend Me A Tenor'

Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor” is now playing at the Players. The whole production is a farce. Seriously. For a critic, that’s a higher level of difficulty. Summarizing a farce is like summarizing a road runner cartoon. (This coyote chased this road runner but his Acme products were defective and the road runner got away.) You get the idea. But here goes anyway …

Once upon a time in 1934, Tito Morelli, the big-time tenor, is set to perform as Otello with the Cleveland Opera Company. It’s opening night. He’s late, and comes in to his hotel room with a stomach ache and an angry wife. To get him to nap, Max feeds him Chianti and phenobarbitals; his wife does too. After a misunderstanding involving an undressed woman in a closet, his wife leaves him, and suicidal Tito finishes off the pill bottle before collapsing on the bed. Max and Harry, the opera organizers, think he’s dead. Comedy ensues.

Kyle Turoff directs with a sure hand. Nobody’s too over the top, nobody’s too laid back. The cast jams together like a good band. Nice physical gags, nice comic timing. She knows how to sell a joke without milking it.

The cast in question includes: Bob Trisolini (in a deft portrayal as Harry Saunders, the pushy, bullying, insecure, charming, grating, scheming-yet-sincere opera manager); Jeff Kin (playing high-strung, milquetoast Max — Harry’s assistant — who eventually finds his inner Caruso); Amanda Heisey (as Maggie, Harry’s daughter and Max’s fiancée, who’s always in the moment, and sells her giddy, star-struck adoration of Tito with mercurial physicalization: eyes rolls, hesitations, etc.); a barrel-chested Berry Ayers (who throws himself into the womanizing-yet-henpecked Tito role with a sharp stage instinct); Kaylene McCaw (as Maria, the operatic, loving-yet-vengeful wife doing the hen-pecking); and Ross Boehringer (always hilarious as the bellowing, Bud Abbott-esque bellboy). Great work from all. Great work also from Patty O’Berg and Lilian Moore in the supporting cast.

The actors know what they’re doing. Thanks to Turoff’s skill, they come together as a true ensemble. No easy task. As Edmund Keane once said, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” And farce is the hardest of all.
If you’ve never done comedy, the elements seem simple. Double entendres, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, lovely ladies, slapstick and slamming doors. How hard can it be?

Very.

To use a stew metaphor, you can get all the ingredients right, but your stew still stinks if you the proportions wrong. To use a mechanical trope, farce needs to hum like a well-oiled machine. But it can’t be mechanical. Forced farced isn’t funny. This always is.

Playwright Ludwig clearly knew what he was doing, too. “Lend Me a Tenor” is obviously his love letter to “Plaza Suite”, “A Night at the Opera,” and other classic 1930s comedies by the Marx Brothers and others. But it’s also his own. It’s one thing to know the formula, another to grasp the essence. Ludwig did, and the director and cast do.

That’s how you get it right.

IF YOU GO
“Lend Me a Tenor” runs through Sept. 21, at Players Theatre, 838 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. For more information, call 365-2494 or visit theplayers.org.