Could You Lend Me A Tenor?

ebrary’s Digital Sheet Music Database Helps Little Travers Civic Theatre Produce Acclaimed Musical Comedy

On its Broadway debut in March 1989 Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me A Tenor was hailed by reviewers in the New York Times, Variety and other publications as one of the funniest musical comedies to appear in many years. An uproarious farce blending slapstick with classical opera, the play recounts the travails of world-famous tenor, Tito Morelli (known to his fans as Il Stupendo), as he attempts to make his U.S. debut. Tito is slated to star in a Cleveland Grand Opera Company performance of Verdi’s Otello, but arrives too late for rehearsal, then takes sick with stomach problems. When he passes out after a little too much red wine and an accidental double dose of tranquilizers, Saunders, the General Manager, presses his assistant Max into service as a stand-in. But when Morelli miraculously recovers and insists on taking the stage, bedlam ensues as the opera company has to contend with two combative tenors, multiple cases of mistaken identity and serial misunderstandings.

From the audience standpoint, Lend Me A Tenor would seem to be a straightforward musical comedy with fast-paced action and a sequence of increasingly zany situations. From a theatrical production standpoint, however, Lend Me A Tenor poses some thorny issues. Which is what director Gary Albert quickly learned when he began rehearsals for the play with the Little Travers Civic Theatre (LTCT) in Petoskey, Michigan. In particular, because it is essentially a play within a play–or more accurately, an opera within a play–Lend Me A Tenor requires that the cast and director have a solid grounding in classical opera, and more to the point, a command of Verdi’s Otello. In order to get the musical segments of the play just right, Albert realized, he would need the original score.

Fortunately for Albert, the LTCT is located near North Central Michigan College (NCMC), which has an excellent performing arts library, including a copy of the grand staff, or conductor’s sheet music, for Otello. Taking the initiative, Albert checked out the score and brought it with him to the first rehearsal. Problem solved? Not quite. Opera grand staffs are large, bulky volumes containing detailed parts for every instrument within an orchestra. As such, the one that Albert checked out of the NCMC library was almost completely unworkable for cast members who simply needed to learn a few select scenes, melodies and dialog from Otello. Eric Grandstaff, who was starring in the play as Morelli, recognized the problem right away, and he recognized a solution as well.

The Show Goes On

A veteran actor and trained operatic tenor, Grandstaff also happens to be the Director of Library and Academic Technologies at NCMC–a happy coincidence one might expect to encounter only in the theater world. “What we really needed in order to learn the Otello material from Lend Me A Tenor was a rehearsal version of the score,” said Grandstaff. “Actually, we were looking for certain excerpts from a single duet or dueto between the compadres Don Carlo and Rodrigo. Fortunately, we were rehearsing in St. Francis Xavier church across the street from the library, so I was able to quickly access a rehearsal version of the Otello score using a wifi-equipped laptop and our ebrary database at the library.”

Director Albert and the rest of the cast and crew were amazed at how easy it was for Grandstaff to find the appropriate score. “When we cast Eric as Morelli we knew we were getting a fine tenor and a comedian with excellent timing and instincts,” said Albert. “But it was his talents as a librarian that got the production off to a great start.” The score that Grandstaff accessed through ebrary’s sheet music database contains parts for piano and two voices–exactly what was needed for the actors to learn their parts. “The rehearsal score is much easier to use because it’s short and succinct,” said Grandstaff. “With ebrary, it was easy to locate the rehearsal score, select the featured dueto, and print out a few copies of just the parts that we needed on the printer at the theater. Bam, ready to go.”

ebrary’s sheet music database provides simultaneous, multi-user access to a unique, view- and print-on-demand database of more than 9,000 digital sheet music titles from world-renowned composers such as Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky. It also features original titles published between 1850 and 1920 by famous composers including Irving Berlin, Stephen Foster, Jerome Kern, and John Philip Sousa.

For Grandstaff, Albert and the rest of the LTCT company, all’s well that ends well. Lend Me A Tenor completely sold out its two-week run, and the reviews were uniformly glowing. One local critic found Grandstaff’s performance “phenomenal,” and went on to note that “although tastefully risqué at times, the talent and humor were ever-present in this amusing production.”

For more information about ebrary’s full-text book databases visit www.ebrary.com/libraries.