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Theatreguide.London
Review
Lend
Me A Tenor
Gielgud
Theatre Summer 2011
This new
musical from America asks the theatrical question Why?
Why turn a perfectly adequate stage farce into a musical when the songs add
nothing and frequently get in the way of the comedy? Lend Me A Tenor is not
a disaster, but all its virtues come from the original play.
Ken Ludwig's 1986 play is an unassuming little farce about a provincial
opera company – the very concept of the Cleveland Grand Opera is a joke,
like Patrick Barlow's National Theatre of Brent – putting on Verdi's Otello.
When the big-name visiting guest star accidentally takes an overdose of
sleeping pills, a local singer has to put on the costume and blackface and
pretend to be him.
He pulls it off, but then has to deal with opera groupies including his own
girlfriend, and with the complications that arise when the star wakes up and
groggily gets into costume and makeup himself. At one point there are
actually three Otellos rushing about, never quite running into each other
but repeatedly being mistaken for each other.
It is of the essence of farce that things happen at such a fast pace, and
with mounting hysteria, that the audience doesn't have time to think about
how improbable and silly the whole thing is. So stopping the action at
regular intervals for a musical interlude seems inherently a bad idea,
especially when the songs by Brad Carroll and Peter Sham of the Utah
Shakespeare Festival (not another joke – it really exists) are uniformly
uninteresting.
Carroll's melodies are occasionally quite sweet, but Sham's pedestrian
lyrics invite your mind to wander into questions like whether just taking
off his eyeglasses makes the hero unrecognisable to his girlfriend and why
nobody notices that the three Otellos look nothing alike.
Damian Humbley is amiable as the shnook who blossoms when everyone thinks
he's the visiting celebrity, and Matthew Kelly has fun wildly overacting as
the panicky impresario.
The women in the cast – Cassidy Janson as the ingenue, Sophie-Louise Dann as
the inge-not-so-new (one of the script's better gags) and Joanna Riding as
the visitor's cartoon-Italian wife - are almost completely wasted, though
Dann has one good scene auditioning for the visitor with a rapid-fire medley
of opera's greatest hits while also trying to seduce him.
When the adaptors get out of the way, some of Ludwig's farce works,
particularly in the second half when things get most frantic and silly, but
the general effect is to make you wish the producers had just revived the
original rather than unsuccessfully gilding the lily.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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Review
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Lend Me A Tenor - Guilgud 2011
