TO SEE OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US : A REVIEW OF SOUVENIR
Dianna Lefas
ccSCOOP News
It takes a brave eye to know what makes great theater, and Laura Margolis, founder and artistic director of Stageworks in Hudson, does not disappoint. It takes bold skill to write a play about a bad singer and get audiences to sit and listen and enjoy, but this is exactly what Stephen Temperley has done in Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins. This comedy about the legendarily bad singer is playing at Stageworks in Hudson through Sunday, August 17.
With impeccable performances by Deborah Jean Templin as Jenkins and John FitzGibbon as her faithful accompanist Cosmé McMoon and deft direction from Marc Geller, Souvenir is a fanciful, hilarious ballet of perfectly timed and executed dialogue around the persistent albeit misguided dream of a woman who believed she was a great diva but had a voice that could curdle titanium. Everything about her singing was wrong. Her voice was a sledgehammer that flattened notes, pulverized pitch, and shattered rhythm–all on a very grand scale. Yet Jenkins loved the classical masters and had the dogged determination to sing them. Souvenir depicts this quality spectacularly and with wit to spare. |
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Deborah Jean Templin plays Florence Foster Jenkins in Stageworks/Hudson's production of Souvenir. |
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The production is embellished with startling costumes by Dennis Ballard, reminiscent of the actual costumes worn with audacious grandiosity by the diva herself. The wardrobe alone is worth the price of admission.
Jenkins (1868-1944), the wealthy New York socialite whom Templin plays with emotional, sensitive, and elegant precision, blissfully ignored any possibility that others’ perception of her and her talent might be different from her own. She believes she is a gifted coloratura soprano. In sweet delusion, she simply cannot understand that the brilliance she imagines exists only in her raw bravado and has eluded her voice altogether.
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John FitzGibbon as Cosme McMoon and Deborah Jean Templin as Florence
Foster Jenkins in Stageworks/Hudson's production of Souvenir. |
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In the play, the story of “Madame Flo” is told in retrospect by her accompanist McMoon, portrayed by FitzGibbon with brisk, delightful, and intelligent poignancy. McMoon initially agrees to be Jenkins’ accompanist because, simply put, he needed to pay his rent, but when he hears her sing he staggers from incredulity—“What was she hearing? What??!!”—to an astonished realization—“Her folly was so stupendous, you had to admire the scale.”
Jenkins believed that if she did not see an obstacle to her singing career, in this case a deplorable lack of talent, then no obstacle existed. Singing Mozart, Verdi, Strauss, and the standards of the operatic repertoire was her passion, but that passion could not be pursued (“My singing was actively discouraged”) until her parents died and she inherited a substantial fortune. At the age of sixty, Jenkins embarked on her brilliant singing career, performing at an annual recital in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton.
McMoon, whose musical talent far surpassed that of the soprano, agrees to accompany her for her first recital in Ritz-Carlton ballroom, believing that he and his connection with her can remain relatively obscure. The engagement stretches into fourteen years, and a true affection develops between the two. Jenkins’ announcement that she has booked Carnegie Hall for her recital, however, puts McMoon in a frenzy, and things only get worse when the recital is sold out.
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But Jenkins’ conviction that one must believe in one’s dreams carries the day, and a recital of twenty-four operatic works, each performed in a different costume, goes forward. It is when Jenkins comes onstage dressed as the “Angel of Inspiration,” complete with wings, that the response of the audience at the recital erupts into laughter and the laughter of the audience for the play melts into compassion for the singer who is grander than life if only in her own innocent eyes.
Jenkins dies one month after the Carnegie Hall engagement with a vague but unsettling sense that she may have been the public’s muse for mockery.
At the end of the play, Templin as Jenkins returns to the stage to sing “Ave Maria,” with power, elegance, and moving purity. This is the voice, McMoon tells us, that Jenkins heard in her head when she sang, no matter what others heard. This is the truly touching moment of Souvenir. It forgives all human foibles and delusions and grants the audience the right to dream grand dreams. In this, Jenkins may well have fulfilled her prophetic fantasy as the “Angel of Inspiration.”
Jenkins’ recordings are still sold today, sixty-four years after her death, and remind us of a woman who refused to be told what she could not do and fearlessly pursued what she believed was her destiny. Deluded or not, she believed in herself, and it is this that endears her to audiences still.
As McMoon concludes, “People still laugh. They never heard her singing but they know enough to laugh.” The production, too, will make you laugh as Templin masterfully re-creates Jenkins’ musical career. But, as in really good productions and with compelling performances by both FitzGibbon and Templin, it will also make you cry, and you will fall in love with Jenkins for her verve. “They can say that I couldn’t sing, but they can never say that I didn’t sing!”
The production team includes Jen Schilansky (production stage manager), Aaron Mastin (set designer), Frank DenDanto III (lighting designer), Phil Elman (sound designer and technical director). |
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This is a regional premier of Souvenir at Stageworks’ Max and Lillian Katzman Theater, 41 Cross Street, Hudson, New York. Box Office: (518) 822-9667.
Souvenir moves from Stageworks in Hudson to the Charles Wood Theater in Glens Falls on August 23 and 24. Information: 518-798-9663.
Photo credit: Dennis Ballard |
