Theater Review—

Theater Barn Accomplishes Slapstick With ‘Tenor’

By Julie Stern

RIDGEFIELD — Back in my school days I had a roommate who was thrilled at being asked out to the opera. It would be her first time, and she looked forward to it for the whole week. On Sunday morning I asked her how it was, and she gave me a tragic look. The opera  turned out to have been Il Trovatore.

“So,” I asked, “Was it as wonderful as you had expected?”

“Il Trovatore!” she exclaimed indignantly. “That was the opera in the Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera. All evening I kept looking for Harpo to come swinging down from the curtain rope. It was all I could think about.”

With Lend Me A Tenor — currently in production at Ridgefield Theater Barn — Ken Ludwig summons up echoes of the Marx Brothers, along with Frank Capra, Kaufman and Hart, Sid Caesar, Noises Off, and perhaps Zero Mostel, all within his door-slamming slapstick farce set in a hotel room before, during and after a very important  performance of Verdi’s Otello,  deep in the heart of 1930’s Cleveland.

World famous opera star Signor Tito (El Stupendo) Merelli has been specially imported to the Boondocks to ensure the success of the fundraiser organized by the board of the Cleveland Opera Company. Fifty thousand dollars worth of tickets have been sold, and knowing Merelli’s reputation for outrageous and self-indulgent behavior,  Saunders, the Company manager, orders  Max, his young assistant, to keep Tito safely under wraps in his hotel suite until showtime.

Max suffers from excessive timidity, unrequited love for Saunders’ daughter Maggie, and an unfulfilled desire to be an opera singer himself. Given those conditions, what can a comic playwright do that involves an ample supply of phenobarbitol (“for calming the nerves”), two identical Othello costumes including blackface makeup and curly wigs, a jealous wife, an assortment of fans and groupies, all mad for the chance to have a private audience with El Stupendo, an apparent suicide note, and six doors, leading to various closets, bathrooms and the hall? I bet you can guess.

What matters for the show to work (and it won all kinds of awards when it ran for 468 performances on Broadway) is crisp pacing, split second timing, and reckless abandon on the part of the actors, as they throw themselves at El Stupendo… or at who they think is El Stupendo.

Happily, the Ridgefield Theater Barn production, under the direction of Beth Bonnebeau-Harding, carries it off very nicely. She is aided in this by the performance of her husband, Joe Harding, in the role of El Stupendo. His body language is perfect, whether he is lying on the bed 15 fifteen minutes, so totally immobile that he is assumed dead, or in his Othello costume letting his face register conflicting emotions of surprise, confusion, rage, and coy seductiveness. The effect is hilarious.

The rest of the cast is equally well drilled and comfortable in their roles: Bob Lussier as Max,  Lisa Michele Cohen as Maggie, Will Jeffries as Saunders, Christine Daley as Tito’s fiery tempered but devoted wife, Tom Libonate as an adoring bellhop, Stephanie King as an ambitious diva, and Glenn Couture in drag as the Chairwoman of the Opera Guild, a kind of “she who must be obeyed!”

Of course they are all time-old stereotypes, but you don’t watch this show for psychological insight into character. You just go to laugh, and that’s what the audience did, continuously.

With The Shadow Box and Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Theater Barn demonstrated that it could handle both serious drama and musical comedy. Now they’ve shown that they can do slapstick farce just as neatly.

If you want a lighthearted evening out, take your picnic and get over to Ridgefield.