SEVENTEEN years after it was first staged in Limerick, College Players have selected the comedy ‘Lend Me a Tenor’ for its second production of 2013.
And producer Joan McGarry Moore, who also took charge of the 1996 production, is clear about her reasons for reviving the Ken Ludwig show.
“It was nominated for nine Tony awards and won six of them. It won the Laurence Olivier Award for comedy and three Drama Desk awards. It was the talk of the town and it’s an hilarious play, a really laugh-out-loud funny show that plays to our strengths”.
Its operatic and musical numbers will be delivered by an intensely musical cast that includes Beena Day of ‘The Voice of Ireland’.
The award-winning director is not the only carry-over from 1996: leading men Dave Griffin (Max, the impressario’s assistant) and Brian McNamara as his rival, Tito Merelli (the famous tenor brought to Cleveland, Ohio to play Othello in the Verdi opera) reprise their same roles.
Other loops from the past at the launch in Lime Tree Theatre include crew members Pa Buckley and Bobby Nash while Mayor Kathleen Leddin – “our 817th mayor of Limerick and our last” who officiated, was in the audience for the original at Belltable Arts Centre, as indeed was ‘Lend Me a Tenor”s bellhop, Nigel Dugdale.
It fell to guest of honour Lorcan Murray of RTE lyric fm to pull the loop tighter, pointing out that this year is the 200th anniversary of Guiseppi Verdi’s death.
“All the action in ‘Lend Me a Tenor’ takes place in the Verdi Hotel, Cleveland, 1930s,” actor/singer Padhraic Hastings (hotel manager) confirmed.
World class opera star in Il Tito arrives and “is so sedated, or plied with drink, that he is presumed dead”. Cue an imbroglio of assumed identities, multiples of ‘Othello’ and swoon loads of women chasing men chasing men.
At Lime Tree Theatre from November 12 to 16, all tickets on Wednesday 13 will be a tenner for the Tenor.
