Tony-awarding winning Ken Ludwig wrote farcical romp

Photo courtesy Elizabeth Mandel

By Calvin Nuttall

Photo courtesy Elizabeth Mandel

In 1930s Paris, opera producer “Henry Saunders” hopes to deliver the most groundbreaking concert of his career — but only if he can keep his cast from falling apart in the hours leading up to the performance of their lifetimes.

Limelight Theater’s “A Comedy of Tenors” opens Aug. 23 for a three-weekend run at the Morgan Hill Community Playhouse. Directed by Allie Bailey, the farcical romp is a follow-up to playwright Ken Ludwig’s Tony award-winning comedy “Lend me a Tenor.” It features Doug Brook and Andy Kline as the feuding star couple “Tito” and “Maria Merelli.”

“I have the most phenomenal cast to tell this story,” Bailey said. “When I was in school, they always said directing is 70 percent casting, and I definitely cast it correctly. They are all so invested, and their comedic timing is so good. It is coming together delightfully well.”

Early in the show, the audience witnesses a marital spat between Tito, the star tenor of the concert, and his wife, Maria.

“They’ve been married 25 years, and it turns out this very day is Maria’s birthday,” Kline said. “She is assuming and expecting Tito has completely forgotten this fact. He is ‘The Star’ of the family, not just of the opera world. He is the star and she is the support person, but she is not a wallflower by any means, either.”

In addition to his marital stress, Tito is also undergoing a welling mid-life crisis, aging in the world of opera where youth is as valuable as talent.

“Tito is going through the later years of his career, and is feeling it,” Brook said. “We delve into the fact that he’s not the young one anymore, and all of that. Maria, of course, is all over that because she sees it, she lives it, she is supporting him.”

Adding fuel to the fire of Tito’s anxiety is the young, up-and-coming tenor “Carlo Nucci,” portrayed by PJ Crocker. Through a hilarious case of mistaken identity, Tito comes to believe Carlo has become Tito’s replacement not only on the stage but in his love life as well. This misunderstanding leads Tito to quit the opera mere hours before its opening, throwing the fate of the performance into jeopardy.

Hilarity ensues as the showrunners struggle to find a replacement for their star tenor. By sheer luck, they find a bellhop named “Beppo” whose appearance and voice are similar enough to Tito’s that they could be doppelgangers. The desperate producers recruit him to be his replacement at the last possible moment.

Photo courtesy Elizabeth Mandel

This is Brook’s fifth Ludwig show. He praises the playwright’s comedic writing, which will have the audience chuckling with the hilarious antics of wacky characters.

“It is very much a slamming-doors farce. There are mistaken identities and various food products get utilized in various ways,” he said. “It is a laugh-a-second kind of a play overall. With comedy, so much is about timing and so much is about energy, and I can’t wait to see the myriad ways we and the audience are going to interact.”

Though “A Comedy of Tenors” is not a musical by the usual definition, the cast have taken several steps to prepare themselves to faithfully portray a group of opera stars, including training on voice and posture by a visiting opera singer.

“We’re not actually going to sing, we’re going to pipe in professional opera,” Brook said. “A few of us are singers, but this is opera. We’re not quite trained for that, but we hope we’ll do it cleverly enough the audience will buy into it.”

This show-behind-a-show will keep audiences laughing until they are out of breath, Bailey said.

“Last night at rehearsal I laughed so hard I  almost passed out because it was so funny,” she said.

Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance writer.