Charles Hutchinson previews Lend Me A Tenor, at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre (From York Press)

Charles Hutchinson previews Lend Me A Tenor, at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre

8:26am Friday 22nd May 2009 in

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IT was a case not so much of Lend Me A Tenor as send me an actor when director Caroline Heppell had to find a replacement for her leading man with only three weeks to go before the opening night.

Up stepped Gareth Cheesman to play Saunders in Ken Ludwig’s fast and frantic farce, and how well he does in his first role outside his more familiar boundaries of musicals.

Ludwig’s humour is no less cheesy than Gareth’s surname and the naturally effervescent director, in her own debut in charge of a “straight” play, invites her cast to toast that cheese to the bubbling max.

The play demands big, broad performances and they don’t come bigger or broader than Lee Gemmell’s tour-de-force as world-famous opera star Tito Mirelli, the Italian tenor with an accent to match Joe Dolce on his farcical 1981 chart-topper Shaddap You Face. Gemmell’s Tito is a play-away romeo, drama queen, mentally unstable loose cannon and charmer rolled into one and he is a scream.

Mirelli arrives in his suite (a love-god bedroom and swanky sitting room with all the doors and cupboards that farce demands) for his performance as Othello for the Cleveland Opera. Both long-suffering wife Maria (Sian Davies) and company big cheese Saunders (Cheesman) struggle to keep him in check, their cause not helped by the assignations of Saunders’ gushing daughter (Claire Horsley) and the aspirations of her opera-singing boyfriend Max (Leon Thompson, in his impressive, quick-thinking debut in a lead role in a play).

When Tito is taken ill, and his cheated wife’s farewell letter is mistaken for his suicide note, Max must step in at Saunders’ insistence to play Othello. Inevitably, we end up with two face-blackened Othellos to confuse everyone, and the more Moors the merrier for the fun and games that spread to involve Rachel Parkinson’s Julia and Joanne Heyes’s equally smitten Diana. Then add to all the bed-hopping, the Bellhop, an exhibition in high camp in brightest orange attire from the ever-enthusiastic Oliver Tattersfield.

The show ends on a suitably high note: a silent movie re-hash at madly high speed of all that has unfolded.

Lend Me A Tenor, Rowntree Players, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight at 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or on the door.