Friday, April 16, 2010

Lend Me A Tenor: REVIEWED

I wish Tony, Brooke, and Jan had better things to do. Such lovely people.



Even if you’ve never seen Lend Me A Tenor, you’ve probably heard the name- the play first bowed on Broadway (after a West End run) in 1989, ran an impressive 476 performances, and is now a staple at community and regional theaters, and an archetypal example of farce. Was this play brought back to Broadway at the Music Box Theater on the strength of its good reputation? Well, probably not- the play’s return most likely has to do with the man running the show this time around: Hollywood heavyweight Stanley Tucci, who’s serving as director of the production. Tucci has a reputation for doing excellent work as an actor, and from his connections in the performing arts, he has assembled an elite cadre of stars from screen and stage. The ones who pop out from the crowded poster and marquee are Anthony LaPaglia, Justin Bartha (“The Hangover”) and married couple Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams. Clearly, these well-known actors, a well-known piece that offers accessible broad comedy, and a “name” director have all been carefully placed to ensure that the show is a success- straight plays are much harder to draw a crowd to on The Great White Way, and often lose vast amounts of money. However, while I have to admit that this show has a can’t-miss cast, that’s the only thing Lend Me A Tenor has going for it.
Tucci is obviously familiar with this piece and the conventions of a madcap stage farce- his directing is tight and moves things quickly. He makes sure the actors fling their lines (or each other) out at just the right moment to get a laugh, and then moves on to setting up the next element of the “falling dominoes” plot. The story (such as it is) concerns the glamorous world of the Cleveland, Ohio Grand Opera Company, where the 1934 season’s fundraiser is a performance of Otello starring a famed Italian tenor, Tito Merelli. In Merelli’s hotel suite, the plans for him to go unstage go horribly awry as his wife leaves him, he passes out and is presumed dead by the General Manager of the Opera, and the manager’s assistant Max takes his place as Othello (blackface and all). Merelli wakes up and once both men are in costume, more chaos ensues are the two are mistaken for each other by everyone, including some amorous women and an autograph-seeking bellhop. This certainly seems like a setup for some sure-fire laughs, yet I am not sure how such a clichéd play became a comedy classic. Some of the situations are very amusing, but the jokes go on too long and are often very predictable. We know about ten minutes into the play that two women want to get intimate with Merelli and that he is a notorious philanderer, so when there are suddenly two of him, we can see the scene where both pairs of men and women make love at the same time coming at us like a speeding truck. An extremely long joke has one of these women, who played Desdemona at the performance Merelli wasn’t actually in, ask him(thinking he was her leading man) how her “performance” was, having just slept with him. “I’m a professional,” she says confidently. Of course, Merelli does not know her real identity and assumes she means something very different. The misunderstanding continues for about five minutes, and you wish author Ken Ludwig had made some cuts. Every line and situation seems contrived to make you laugh or else, as if Ludwig and Tucci were choking me the way Shalhoub chokes LaPaglia onstage when he thinks the latter is dead, and screaming “Don’t you think this is the funniest play you’ve ever seen? Well, DO YOU? LAUGH!”
The cast is without a doubt, the best thing about this show. Tucci has picked actors who are known for being subtle and dedicated, and not only has he picked some big names who can carry a star part in a play, for the minor roles he also managed to find some talented stage actors with impressive credentials. In terms of lines and role in the plot, the leading role in the show is technically Justin Bartha’s, though he’s not truly a “name” yet and thus isn’t billed first. For someone who starred the raunchy comedy The Hangover, you’d think he’d be out of his element playing a mild-mannered character in a Broadway show that mostly deals in innuendo. However, he makes his plucky character, Max, someone audiences will root for. When Max(who yearns to be an opera star but sings like a creaking door) gets a chance to step into Merelli’s shoes, Bartha makes it a sort of Clark Kent-to-Superman transformation, and both character and actor seem to be having the time of their lives. Anthony LaPaglia, as Merelli, is billed first, but out of the three men with top billing, he has the least to do-and he’s the title character! If his bio in the playbill is any indication, he did the play to work with his friend Tucci, and while he’s no slouch onstage, it’s the kind of part any able actor could have played. Most of all, even with identical outfits all the blackface in the world, it’s impossible to mistake portly LaPaglia for lanky Justin Bartha. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but how can we believe that Max’s girlfriend can’t tell the difference? The curtain call, which starts with a sped-up re-enactment of the play, is cute but too long.
Tony Shalhoub may be indelibly burned into our minds as TV’s “Monk”, but now that his series is over, he seems to be having giddy fun doing a 180 degree turn as Manager Saunders: he’s playing a blustering impresario who deals in verbal abuse and chokeholds, as opposed to a man who is afraid of things like milk. Much scenery is chewed whenever’s he’s onstage, but that’s the approach needed for this type of piece. More importantly, he manages to wrestle your focus away from any other actor when he steps into the action. His wife, veteran actress Brooke Adams, does what she can with a disappointingly small role. She is meant to be the “eccentric older woman of society” you see so often in comedies, but the subtlety she uses compared to the rest of the cast, or how another actress might do it, is refreshing. An example of this is that her character, Julia, is dressed in a garish chrome-colored gown and is meant to look ridiculous (as when she flirts with Merelli, who’s extremely uninterested), but she’s not ridiculous at all- for a 62 year old, Ms. Adams is very attractive and fit, and even in her over-the-top outfit, she carries herself like the Princess of Wales. Again, I think in this case it was a relationship that determined casting- Adams is obviously in the play to be with her husband.
The rest of the cast is made up of actors who are no strangers to Broadway- all try gamely but two stood out. Mary Catherine Garrison, as Max’s ditzy girlfriend Maggie, tries a little too hard to be cute; finally, another veteran, lauded actress who is in a role far too small for her is in this show. I’m referring to Jan Maxwell, who plays Merelli’s wife Maria. Maxwell highly impressed me in her Tony-nominated turn in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and as the lead in this past fall’s “The Royal Family”- but here, she only appears in the beginning and end of the play. However, much as she did in “Chitty”, she remains burned into your mind due to her ability to initially come off as very cool and elegant, only to explode like an atomic bomb and have you fall out of your seat with laughter- such as when she screams at LaPaglia for philandering and jumps on a bed while sarcastically suggesting she’ll get herself to a nunnery. If Lend Me A Tenor scattered moments like this instead of shooting to make every moment a belly laugh, it would be a more successful play- especially in the hands of such a great cast.

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