Put quite simply, Lend Me A Tenor is good. Very good. The farce about the world of opera, put on by the RPI Players, is well-organized, well-played, and above all extremely funny. Lend Me A Tenor, written by Ken Ludwig, tells the story of the guest appearance of the famous Italian opera tenor Tito Merelli in a performance of Oterro by the Cleveland General Opera Company in 1934.
The first thing that goes wrong, but by no means the last, is the late arrival of Merelli, played wonderfully by Alpha Psi Omega member Brian Baum. The majority of the humor in Lend Me A Tenor comes from mistaken identity situations when Max, the assistant to the general manager of the Cleveland General Opera Company, is forced to perform Merelli’s role.
Max and his boss, the General Manager Saunders, are played by Mike Hall and Bradley Lamoreux, respectively. Both were excellent. The perennially overanxious character of Saunders, and his interactions with Max and the enthusiastic bellhop, played by Marcus Griep, added much humor to the play.
Meighan Carivan-Esmond is by far the most forceful presence of the play in her portrayal of Merelli’s wife, Maria. Not even the great Il Stupendo (Merelli’s sometimes stage name) can or wants to stand up to an enraged Maria.
An important element of the humor of Lend Me A Tenor is the melodrama of some scenes. For example, Merelli’s raucously overdone reaction to Maria’s apparently permanent departure and Saunders lifting the bellhop by his shirt and telling him to leave Merelli’s hotel room, where all of the action takes place, both scored big laughs.
Lend Me A Tenor’s set is of impressive quality. So smoothly integrated are the real furnishings with those parts of the set built by the Players that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Everyone who worked on the set deserves congratulations for a job well done.
The set is ingeniously designed. The two main rooms are the living room and the bedroom, which are separated by a cutaway wall positioned so the audience sees it edge-on. The set also has a door to an offstage kitchen, another to an offstage bathroom, and an on-stage closet. The closet is big enough to contain several large suitcases . . . or a person, which gives a good idea of the kind of humor present in Lend Me A Tenor.
One of the funniest parts of Tenor is after it’s over. The actors run back on stage and reenact the entire play without dialogue in just about a minute and a half. This involves a lot of running around and is quite hilarious.
In addition, the ever-present but seldom-recognized lighting and sound crew did their usual excellent job of keeping everything perfectly timed. The sign of a well-organized tech crew is that the audience doesn’t know they exist while watching the play, which was certainly the case for Lend Me A Tenor.
Lend Me A Tenor has three more performances at the RPI Playhouse on November 13, 14, and 15. Ticket prices are very reasonable, as they always are at the Playhouse. If you haven’t already seen it, Lend Me A Tenor is one show you do not want to miss. Ciao!
