They’re saying the coming side-splitting comedy, Lend Me a Tenor, is the perfect antidote to Canberra’s winter chills, and they could be right.

Set in the fictional Cleveland Grand Opera (actually Cleveland Ohio does have an opera company, but not a silly one like this), the story erupts when the world-famous Italian tenor Tito Merelli, Il Stupendo, is booked for one night only and everything goes wrong.

With slamming doors and mistaken identities, it’s a quintessential farce and will be played out in the intimate surrounds of ACT Hub’s theatre in Kingston.

When I catch up with Maxine Beaumont, who plays Maggie, I find there’s been an important change to the script since last I saw it.

For in the original version of Ken Ludwig’s play, the opera was Verdi’s Otello, but a 2019 rewrite changed it to Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, because the main joke, confusions about the blackface make-up for Otello was, by contemporary standards, a complete no-no, so was replaced with another running joke – clown-face.

In Beaumont’s view, Pagliacci was an inspired choice to replace Otello, for some of the story of the Leoncavallo opera is to do with the clown’s wife Nedda, a sort of temptress who uses her sexuality, not unlike the play’s soprano Diana, played with over-the-top relish by Meaghan Stewart.

Beaumont’s character, Maggie, is the daughter of Saunders, the producer of the opera, played by Michael Sparks, a role, she says, “so delightfully spiky and intense that he’s a lovely foil to all the silliness”.

One of the comedy’s three singing roles, Maggie is a young woman yet to experience life, who nurtures a romantic fantasy about the famous tenor. But as the plot thickens, she finds that her romantic ideals are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Wally Allington, who plays the great Tito in a sort of Plácido Domingo style, has a strong background in classical singing and Max, Maggie’s boyfriend, is played by John Whinfield, who really can sing too, as we saw when he played the star role in American Idiot for Queanbeyan Players, though it’s quite a leap from Green Day to Pagliacci.

Given that Tito and Max have to sing a duet together, Dio, che nell’alma infondere, from Verdi’s Don Carlos, it’s a good thing that Whinfield’s been been picking up few tips on the art of “opera technique” from well-known Canberra singing teacher, SarahLouise Owens.

Apart from the singing, which is real, the rest is “incredibly silly, witty and laugh-out-loud, lots of closing doors and even a romantic twist.”

“It’s a lot of fun but it’s hard work… to make things look so chaotic it takes a lot of order in rehearsal and a high level of precision and rigour,” Beaumont says.

Lend Me a Tenor, ACT Hub, Kingston, September 17-27.