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Picture the first day of rehearsal for a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama populated with complex characters with intertwined histories. You might expect a couple of days of labored "table work" to talk through the relationships. Now picture the company preparing for the new Broadway revival of Ken Ludwig's farce, Lend Me a Tenor, which will open April 4 at the Music Box Theatre after previews from March 12. The rehearsal process is a little different.

"You throw 'em in!" said Tenor director Stanley Tucci. "It's trial by fire. We did one read-through on the first day, and the next day we got on our feet. We had everything here — props, everything — ready to go. You get on your feet, take the book and start moving."

For the show, which relies on slamming doors, mistaken identities and just-missed connections, the funny is all in the timing, so nailing the physical aspect is necessarily the first order of business. "It's the only way," said Tucci, "I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to ruminate, let's just go and do it. That's how you learn."

Getting a show up on its feet might sound like a perfectly ordinary task, but farce is more timed and structured that perhaps any other theatrical form — there are even urban theatre legends of directors using storyboards or metronomes to maintain the necessary precision. This demands both mental and physical focus from the Tenor cast, which includes farce veterans and first-timers alike. They spoke to Playbill.com in between recent rehearsals leading to the first preview.

"It really is physically demanding," said Mary Catherine Garrison, who plays the show's ingenue, Maggie Saunders, daughter of the manager. "I've fallen probably six times so far, bruised everything already, and we're only two weeks in. It's like a dance, an intensely choreographed dance, and it's been great, but it's hard."

She added, "You know you just have to hit your marks…and then keep repeating it over and over and over until you're dead."

Jan Maxwell, a veteran comic actress who plays Maria, the title tenor's wife, still finds the form challenging. "It's so technical — a lot of it is things just have to match on either side of the stage," she said. "The stage is divided into two parts, there's the bedroom of the hotel room and there's the sitting room of the hotel room, so there's a lot of comedy going on both sides, so there's a lot of technical stuff that we have to do."