Good cast makes for good 'Lend Me a Tenor' fluff

Some of the most appealing actors of stages and screens have chosen to display themselves in a revival of "Lend Me a Tenor," Ken Ludwig's '30s-style screwball sex farce that, even at its 1989 premiere, seemed a middling throwback to a more tolerant era for flatulence jokes, mistaken identities in blackface and a sight gag with a toilet plunger.

Why, you may well ask? Well, I answer as a softening lifelong representative of the farce-averse, why not? Stanley Tucci, with all his restless creative intelligence, picked this good-natured mug-fest with which to make his Broadway directing debut. Around him have gathered Tony Shaloub, Anthony LaPaglia, Justin Bartha and Jan Maxwell (New York theater's resident retro-style queen).

The result is good fluff, elevated by showing-off, whistle-stop pacing and the pleasures of sharing a theater with actors working pleasurably to make us hang our brains at the door.

The hotel farce, about chaos behind "Otello" at a Cleveland Opera gala, is not nearly as clever as Kaufman and Hart comedies, nor does it have the loony danger of "Noises Off." But after a self-conscious start (much of it about wax fruit), Tucci's ensemble nails just about every hyper-physical take in the comedy archives, building to the recap (around designer John Lee Beatty's timelessly ornate hotel suite) that telescopes all the action into about 45 seconds of sweet dazzle.

Shalhoub luxuriates in the phony-baloney snootiness of the provincial impresario whose Italian superstar arrives blotto from an abundance of food, women and pills. LaPaglia, best known for his stoic characters, makes a spectacular leap against type as the flamboyant tenor, an infantile cornucopia of aging appetites and an atsa-spicy-meatball accent, who spends much of the second act playing dead or peering with befuddled pathos from behind Otello's blackface.

Bartha, the gofer who fills in for the star, is terrific in virtuoso changes from puppy to stallion, even singing the friendship duet from "Don Carlo" with Il Stupendo. Mary Catherine Garrison makes a strong-willed ingenue as the gofer's reluctant girlfriend, Brooke Adams defies the dowager trap as the board chairlady, and Maxwell is deliciously serpentine as the tenor's beleaguered, but hardly long-suffering, wife.