Lend Me a Tenor
Lend Me a Tenor is a period comedy that takes place in the ‘30’s. It is about a super-star Tenor, who is known as “Il Stupendo” to his fans. After going through a crisis backstage, the Tenor falls unconscious, and then the show producers try to find someone who can replace him in a hurry.
Lend Me a Tenor's Big Break
Lend Me a Tenor was created by Ken Ludwig, and it was his first Broadway play. Ludwig put on a number of plays before Lend Me a Tenor, “off-off Broadway” as he says, until he met the right producer, who read the Lend Me a Tenor script and wanted to show it to a friend. “What’s your producer-friend’s name?,” Ludwig asked. It turned out the friend was Andrew Lloyd Webber.
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Two days later, Ludwig’s phone rang. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber calling. He wanted to produce the play on London’s West End, and two days later, Ludwig was on a plane to England. The play opened six months later. “I’m proud of the fact that Andrew took such an interest in one of my early works,” Ludwig recalled looking back on his incredible big break. “And I’m equally proud of the fact that I paid my dues by working my tail off and writing a number of plays before that.”
Tenor Terrific
Lend Me a Tenor played for close to a year in London, and it played for nearly five hundred performances on Broadway. The recent 2010 revival was directed by Stanley Tucci (star of Big Night and The Devil Wears Prada), and starred Anthony LaPaglia as the Tenor of the title. Lend Me a Tenor has also been revived in England as well.
Lend Me a Tenor proved a great Broadway and West End debut for Ludwig, and audiences and critics loved it. “Uproarious!, Hysterical!,” USA Today raved. CBS Radio called it “Screamingly funny.” WNEW called it “The funniest show on Broadway,” and Time Out called it “a furiously paced comedy with more than a touch of the Marx brothers…A marvelous combination of wonderful farcical moments and funny lines.”
Lend Me a Tenor earned eight Tony nominations (and one win for Actor), and has been put on in twenty-five countries, translated into sixteen languages. A musical version of Lend Me a Tenor was also helmed in 2006 for the Utah Shakespearean Festival New American Playwright Project.
Other Ken Ludwig plays include Crazy For You in 1992, which he won a Tony for, Moon Over Buffalo in 1995, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 2001, and Twentieth Century in 2004, an updating of a classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play (Hecht and MacArthur also wrote the stage classic The Front Page together).
