Lend Me a Tenor

Role: Technical Director & Scenic Designer

When a world-famous Italian tenor passes out before a massive gala performance, a stressed-out opera manager scrambles to find a replacement. Through a series of frantic misunderstandings, an assistant steps into the costume, only for the real tenor to wake up and cause absolute chaos. What follows is a wild, high-energy comedy of errors where timing is everything—and the set has to keep up.

The Scenic Challenge: Doors... So Many Doors

A classic farce relies entirely on split-second timing, which meant the set design required seven independent, fully functional doors built to withstand constant, aggressive slamming.

• The Split-Wall Engineering: To maintain the illusion of a grand 1930s hotel suite across a split wall while ensuring absolute stability, I rigged a hidden tension cable system to pull the entire center wall perfectly into square and lock it down.

• Period Scale: The grand scale of the hotel suite required covering 12-foot-tall walls in massive amounts of period-accurate wallpaper, a tedious task that ultimately paid off in creating a rich, immersive environment.

• Prop Hunting: My wife and I spent weeks hunting down authentic 1930s vintage furniture to ground the comedy in true-to-the-era Art Deco elegance.

Special FX: The Vintage Flash Camera

Beyond the structural hurdles, the show required a unique prop fabrication challenge: a vintage Brownie camera that needed a bright, functionally reliable flash on cue. I sourced a vintage body and custom-built a high-powered LED flash module into the handle, giving the production a safe, blindingly realistic 1930s flash photography effect every single night.