Lend Me a Tenor Broadway Reviews

Stanley Tucci makes a slam-bang Broadway directing debut, with the brio and instinct for timing that you would expect from a seasoned actor. He has, moreover, inspired a cast of comic equals (even in the smaller roles) to harmonize the insanity, land the gags and top each other for the daffy monomania that is the sine qua non of farce. And what a vehicle they have: Ludwig’s old-fashioned screwball door-slammer is structurally perfect, all missed connections, mistaken identities, girls hiding in closets and an enraged impresario throttling his deceased tenor—multiple times.

The thunderous ovation that occurs at the conclusion of the new Broadway revival of Ken Ludwig's now-classic farce, Lend Me a Tenor, is the kind usually reserved for an opera virtuoso or a showstopping bit of stagecraft, like a falling chandelier or an onstage helicopter. But the crackerjack cast of this latest Tenor earns their rapturous applause by using perhaps the most old-fashioned bit of showstopping stagecraft there is: superlative acting. Theirs is comic playing of the highest order, and their inspired, go-for-broke performances propel the audience to the heights of comic ecstasy.

Audiences from Boca Raton to Baden Baden have been laughing themselves silly at 'Lend Me a Tenor' since 1986, when Ken Ludwig's opera buffa was first produced on the West End by Andrew Lloyd Webber. After its 1989 Broadway premiere, show's been done around the world and is a perennial favorite of regional and community theaters in the USA. Not to be denied their own fun, helmer Stanley Tucci and a contingent of Broadway and Hollywood stars toplined by Tony Shalhoub and Anthony LaPaglia are now lending their glamour to this warhorse, giving a new generation reason to roar.

Visual in the classic way of traditional farce, Lend Me a Tenor (Music Box) requires no review, only laughter. In this standard door-slamming mixup, about a bush-league opera company stuck with a corpsed-out guest star, the lines and events, unlike those in any other Ken Ludwig play I've ever encountered, all actually function coherently in context. Justin Bartha is fetchingly wistful in the lead, and Tony Shalhoub's bullying eyes, acting epics all over the stage, are a multimedia event in themselves.

People born when 'Lend Me a Tenor' premiered on Broadway just turned 21, so it's time for a new generation to laugh themselves silly over Ken Ludwig's frisky hotel room comedy. The original production was a major hit and a similar success looks likely for this brightly performed and highly enjoyable Broadway revival which opened Sunday at the Music Box Theatre.

There are bona fide stars in the re vival of Ken Ludwig's 'Lend Me a Tenor,' which opened last night: Tony Shalhoub from 'Monk' and Anthony LaPaglia, a Tony winner for 'A View From the Bridge' in 1998. But it's Justin Bartha -- the missing groom from the hit movie 'The Hangover' -- who takes the final bow. And Bartha deserves it: He's the engine that powers this show. He doesn't just make his Broadway debut, he dynamites the doors open. Happily, the rest of the cast rises to the challenge, and 'Lend Me a Tenor' is exactly what it needs to be: hilarious.

Ken Ludwig’s quarter-century old “Lend Me a Tenor” is revived on Broadway with a deft cast including Tony Shalhoub, Anthony LaPaglia and Jan Maxwell, under the direction of that expert comedian Stanley Tucci. And as before, it entertains.

When it premiered more than 20 years ago, Ken Ludwig's 'Lend Me a Tenor' felt like an uninspired attempt to write the kind of screwball farce that was so popular decades earlier. It seems no less so with its current Broadway revival, but there's no denying that director Stanley Tucci has staged the hell out of it. The play itself might be derivative, mechanical and devoid of real wit, but this production starring Anthony LaPaglia, Tony Shalhoub and Justin Bartha is at times hysterically funny.

deal of the credit goes to Stanley Tucci, in his Broadway directing debut. Tucci obviously spent a great deal of time working with his actors on their timing and perfecting delightful flourishes like the flying objects and one particularly blood-curdling scream from one of the actresses. The rest of the credit goes to the stellar cast: All involved are great, but LaPaglia, Shalhoub, Bartha, and Maxwell particularly stand out. (Shalhoub's searing and repeated 'goddammit!' during the show's first act is especially memorable.)

The hotel farce, about chaos behind 'Otello' at a Cleveland Opera gala, is not nearly as clever as Kaufman and Hart comedies, nor does it have the loony danger of 'Noises Off.' But after a self-conscious start (much of it about wax fruit), Tucci's ensemble nails just about every hyper-physical take in the comedy archives, building to the recap (around designer John Lee Beatty's timelessly ornate hotel suite) that telescopes all the action into about 45 seconds of sweet dazzle.

The plot machinery in 'Lend Me a Tenor' is adequate; it's the performances that lift the production to sublime comic heights.

Despite a serious case of miscasting, Stanley Tucci's riotous staging of Ken Ludwig's 'Lend Me a Tenor' provides an evening full of belly laughs, slapstick action, and projectiles aimed into the orchestra seats. If you want to laugh yourself silly and you're willing to duck fruit, champagne corks, and flung roses, this is the show for you. But you're going to have to suspend a huge chunk of your disbelief, and I suspect the main audience for this 1989 farce will be more than willing to do so.

But what gives this production an unexpected boost is something not usually found in a farce — heart. That quality is supplied by Bartha, making his Broadway debut as the nervous would-be tenor. The actor is a superb farceur, at ease with the verbal complexity of the give-and-take dialogue and the physical demands of the role that have him bouncing around the stage.

Ken Ludwig's farce, which follows the backstage shenanigans at a small-time opera company's gala in 1930s Cleveland, doesn't invite subtle gestures to begin with. But director Stanley Tucci has clearly instructed his ensemble to abandon all inhibitions in the pursuit of a goofy good time.

Dramatic actor Anthony LaPaglia proves himself a deft comic as skirt-chaser Tito and Jan Maxwell is living laughing gas as his hissing, howling hellcat of a wife, Maria. She outdoes this season's earlier standout female comic turn - also hers, in 'The Royal Family.' The evening's great surprise: Justin Bartha, known for adorable sidekick roles in 'National Treasure' and 'The Hangover.' He's fall-down funny and owns the show as mild-mannered-turned-manly Max.

The script by Mr. Ludwig—who also wrote Crazy for You and Moon Over Buffalo—is carefully and cleverly constructed. But at two and a half hours, including intermission, it’s also too long, especially in the latter half of the first act, when the scenes, and the slapstick, seem to drag on. Mr. Tucci makes his debut as a stage director with this show, and he does excellent work with the comedy, especially the well-choreographed physical bits—it’s not every day that you see audience members literally throwing their heads back and guffawing, as they did, frequently, at the performance I attended. But, still, there’s that pacing problem: The show would be better if Mr. Tucci kept it moving faster, perhaps by trimming some of the script.

Oh, the joys of light farcical comedy: doors slamming, mistaken identities, frantic pace, frenzied chaos, shameless personalities, double entendres, sexual innuendos. It's all in 'Lend Me a Tenor,' Ken Ludwig's recreation of a 1930s screwball comedy of errors. Stanley Tucci, who is making debut as a stage director, has not reinterpreted the popular comedy so much as meticulously rebuilt it as a crowd pleasing farce. The ensemble cast includes Anthony LaPaglia, Tony Shalhoub, Justin Bartha and Jan Maxwell.

Ken Ludwig's hotel suite farce, making comic fodder out of what happens when a 1934 Cleveland opera company arranges for a world famous Italian star to play the title role in a one-night gala performance of Otello, only to have him suddenly unable to perform minutes before curtain, may not be the most uproarious of entertainments, but it's certainly good for a decent stream of laughs when the pacing crackles and the door slamming is well-timed. Tucci, however, directs the piece as a comedy, seeming to want the laughs to come from a realistic exploration of the characters. And, of course, realistic explorations are what kills farce. While he does come up with some appropriately nutty visuals, the production suffers from too much thinking time.

Ken Ludwig writes comfy, low-stakes farces in which no one is embarrassed—at least not for long—and all of the characters live happily ever after. 'Lend Me a Tenor,' last seen on Broadway in 1990, is the quintessential example of Mr. Ludwig's easygoing comic approach, a farce about a production of Verdi's 'Otello' whose star (here played by Anthony LaPaglia) fails to show up for opening night. The plot is properly labyrinthine, the jokes reasonably clever, but never once do you thrill with sadistic glee as a pompous twit strolls heedlessly toward his well-deserved rendezvous with humiliation. If that's what you expect from a farce—and I do—you'll find 'Lend Me a Tenor' to be amiable but more then a few teeth short. If not, you'll like it just fine.

Much of the responsibility for the evening’s only fitful amusement lies with the material itself. “Lend Me a Tenor” was a big hit in its first Broadway run two decades ago, playing for more than a year and winning a Tony for the great Philip Bosco in the role of the impresario. But Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, noted that Mr. Ludwig’s comedy “is all things farcical except hilarious.” This time around, the unhilarity is almost uninterrupted, and sometimes magnified by miscasting and flaccid pacing.

The premise of the fun is that all white people in blackface look alike. Justin Bartha gets to sing and swagger; the subtle Anthony LaPaglia gets to play dumb; Jan Maxwell gets to behave as outrageously as Lady Gaga; and the charming Tony Shalhoub, the impresario between a rock and a hard place, gets to do everything else, including spit wax fruit at the audience and twice try to strangle the Italian star he thinks has died on him. Unlike the modern masters of the form, Georges Feydeau and Joe Orton, Ludwig never raises the characters’ level of confusion or aggression to the point of breakdown. The shriek of madness, when it finally comes in Ludwig’s fun machine, gets laughs, but it’s unearned by the writing.