By Cynthia Citron      

BRENTWOOD---You might not think that sitting still for two hours listening to an aging soprano sing operatic arias totally off-key would be a wonderful way to spend an evening.  But back in the 1930s it was definitely the cat’s pajamas.

 

       The off-key soprano was Florence Foster Jenkins, an earnest society lady in New York who as “a true coloratura” in her own mind (“I have purity of tone,” she said) would periodically perform in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.  The performances were wildly popular, performed for a select audience of friends as tone-deaf as she.  And then later, for huge audiences of the general public who came to laugh, but also wound up respecting her innocence and sincerity and her overwhelming passion for her music.

 

       This uniquely eccentric woman died in 1944, but her doppelganger is alive and well and performing currently on the stage of the Brentwood Theatre.  The marvelous Judy Kaye has brought the story of Florence Foster Jenkins to Los Angeles from her successful run on Broadway (she was nominated for a Tony for this role—not bad for a little Jewish girl who began her career playing Queen Esther at her Temple at the age of seven!) This current production is called Souvenir, A Fantasia On The Life of Florence Foster Jenkins.

 

       Jenkins’ story is told by her long-time piano accompanist, Cosme McMoon (played with warmth and sensitivity by Donald Corren).  Clad in a period suit and a full gray wig, he looks very much like Steve Martin, which makes his performance even funnier—although he plays it straight most of the time.  Over the 12 years that McMoon accompanied Madame Jenkins he became extraordinarily fond of her, admiring her weird courage, and always acknowledging her performances with ambiguous praise: “Well, THAT was an evening that no one will soon forget!”

 

       “I’m hearing a certain want of accuracy,” McMoon confides to himself.  “What was SHE hearing?”  Madame, for her part, derided “this modern mania for accuracy” and judged herself the equal (or the better) of all the leading opera stars of her time.  To spare her feelings, the audience would clap and stomp and cheer to cover the sound of their laughter.  And if she heard the laughter, she ascribed it to “jealousy” or the audience’s being “overcome with emotion.”   Even the  critics came to admire her “quaint nobility” and “the scale of her follies” and treated her with gentle ambivalence.  (One of them called her “the first lady of the sliding scale.”)

 

       At her first public recital she sang 24 songs and five encores (each with a different costume of her own design), all accompanied by fiercely exaggerated gestures and awkward little dance steps.  In one of her most popular numbers, a song called “Clavelitos”, she wore an elaborate Spanish dress and shawl, danced a clumsy fandango, and tossed flowers to the audience while they shouted “Ole!”

 

       “Art cannot be ruled by caution,” she proclaimed, and she went on to make several classic recordings.  But the climax of her career, and the “achieving of the dream”, came in 1944 with her concert in Carnegie Hall.  Tickets were sold out almost immediately, and some 2,000 additional people were turned away on the actual night.  Before that monumental and life-affirming performance her only concession to doubt was to murmur, “I wonder if this is what it feels like to be nervous?”

 

       This exhilarating play was written by Stephen Temperley and directed by Vivian Matalon.   The beautiful set (Madame’s music room, with high walls of royal blue and white and elegant gold trim) was designed by R. Michael Miller.  And the wonderfully colorful costumes (including a reproduction of Jenkins’ famous winged “Angel of Inspiration” costume)  are by Tracy Christensen.

 

       Cosme McMoon, an obviously fabricated name, was in reality a fine pianist named Edwin McArthur, who was perhaps better known as the accompanist for the greatest singer of the time, Kirsten Flagstad.   Donald Corren plays him with incredulous restraint, a gifted touch on the piano, and a sweetly melodic singing voice.  But the evening belongs to Judy Kaye.  With her miscarried rhythm, her yips and howls, her silences in the upper registers that she can’t fully reach, her unswerving optimism and confidence, and her sweet and determined innocence, she is magnificent.  She makes dreadful singing a whole new art form: bad music never sounded so good!

 

       Souvenir will continue every day but Monday through November 12th.  The Brentwod Theatre is located at 11301 Wilshire Blvd., off San Vicente in the Veterans Administration compound, in Brentwood.