Lend me a tenor (Broadway 2010)

Lend me a tenor is a fun irrelevant farce with a great cast playing on Broadway right now. It stars Tony Shalhoub, Anthony LaPagia, and The Hangover’s Justin Bartha. It is directed by Stanley Tucci.

Despite being fun, it is good but not great. It tries to be Marx Brothers/Neil Simon play without the brilliantly witty dialogue and the subtle drama. Many of the jokes are hackneyed and the plot is far too predictable for someone that such matters usually doesn’t bother much.

Although stage direction is great, the actors do a lot with their space and play with audience’s sense of spatial intuition; the play itself leaves much to be desired.

It is basically an English, as in England, comedy written in the 1980’s trying to be a Jewish-American comedy from the 1930’s. The stereotypes are right but the insights and sole’s are all wrong.

Mostly the plays survives on the presence of Tony Shalhoub and the funny facial expressions of Justin Bartha, the rest is often a lot of sex jokes.

I would not recommend paying a lot of money to see this.