LEND ME A TENOR
“Something you have to understand about Italians,” says hot-blooded Angie Graziano to lukewarm Terry O’Keefe in Tom Dulack’s play Breaking Legs. “It’s always very dramatic.”
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Max (note the Germanic monicker), the hero of Lend Me a Tenor, is a shy, insecure assistant to the director of a provincial opera company in 1930s Cleveland. The company hopes to attract publicity and funds by importing a legendary tenor, internationally known as Il Stupendo, to star in its new production. But when Tito the tenor arrives, he proves to be somewhat troublesome, prone to womanizing, overeating, and fighting with his high-strung shrew of a wife. All three problems are related, actually: Tito’s tendency to gorge on fruit is a sublimation of his breast fetish, and his taste for extramarital encounters is primarily a way to keep the temperature of his marriage hot. But things boil over when Tito accidentally munches on a few too many wax peaches; taken ill, he’s inadvertently given too many sleeping pills, and when it’s time for Max to take him to the theater he seems to be dead. So Max–who has already been given a few passing lessons in singing and sexiness by the tenor–is enlisted to impersonate the apparently dead star. Since the opera is Verdi’s Otello, the impersonation is fairly simple: one white singer in Moorish blackface looks pretty much like another, and as for the singing, well, the culture vultures who’ve paid for the performance are more interested in seeing Il Stupendo than in how he sounds.
This is not a deep play we’re talking about here. But it is a funny one. The 1930s setting is the playwright’s excuse to brandish most every gimmick in the trunk of Depression-era Hollywood screwball humor: manic physical slapstick and slow double takes, class-conscious caricatures of dizzy dowagers and brassy bellhops, ridiculous cases of mistaken identity, and groaner puns and naughty double entendres (one of the best is a drawn-out routine in which Tito thinks the soprano is a prostitute and so mistakes her comments about how she always wanted to be in the same business as her mother and father). And of course, there are those Italian stereotypes: there’s plenty of sobbing, shrieking, and hand waving.
Where Lend Me a Tenor emulates farce and screwball comedy, Breaking Legs aspires to a more naturalistic style, eschewing the former’s manic physicality in favor of a more relaxed, verbal humor. Though Tenor is the better play, it needs much more stylization and fire than director Michael Leavitt has given it here; the actors go through their paces engagingly, but most of them lack the borderline-insanity level of energy that the script requires. The best performances come from John Herrera and Paula Scrofano as the tenor and his wife; their clowning is vigorous, passionate, and obsessive, as well as impeccably timed. As Max, Gene Weygandt is all wrong; though he’s a marvelously precise actor, Weygandt’s Church Lady cum Pee-wee Herman mannerisms are much too fey, and you never believe he wants the girl (or that he’d know what to do with her if he got her). David Sabin, as the impresario Saunders, is burly and bearish in a role that calls for droll elegance; and in one of the play’s funniest bits, when Saunders tries to strangle the seemingly dead body of the tenor, Sabin misses the humor completely: we’re watching Sabin wishing for laughs, not Saunders wishing he could kill a man who’s already dead. Among the rest of the cast, only Mary Seibel as an insistent socialite has the right nutty flair.
