The Guardsman
Elyse Sommer
July 21, 2010: Ferenc Molnar's 1910 Viennese confection, The Guardsman (Testor, in its original Hungarian version), didn't become a hit, until 1924 when Alfred Lunt played the insecure actor who stages an elaborate masquerade to test his wife's fidelity and Lunt's wife Lynne Fontanne played the is-she-or-isn't-she faithful wife. That production not only turned the corner for the play but established Lunt and Fontanne as the theater's favorite husband and wife team. Its several film versions included one starring the actors who made it a hit (the only movie they ever made). With the plot similar to Mozart's opera cosi fan tutti, it's not surprising that the play was also musicalized — in 1941 as the operetta The Chocolate Soldier and in 1990 as a small book musical, Enter the Guardsman
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