Beauty in the Ear of the beholder
Souvenir tells the story of Florence Foster Jenkins - outrageously successful at singing badly.
By Helen Watson White In Theatre- The Listener
ou welcome reviewing “a fantasia of the life of Florence Foster Jenkins”, since she’s world famous for doing something well. You’re also compromised, for the career at which Jenkins was so outrageously successful was in singing badly.
Some interesting background to this script given its first New Zealand showing at Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre: writer Stephen Temperley earlier tried two other story forms – full-scale play and one-woman show – abandoning both. His third try explores the American singer’s project through the eyes of her accompanist, Cosme McMoon.
Temperley shapes a revealing contrast “between the way we see ourselves and the way the rest of the world sees us”. The story, he says, shows someone “who is nothing except self-doubting” meeting someone “with absolutely no self-doubt”.
McMoon opens, idling on a grand piano that is patent-leather black. Looking back years after Jenkins’ death, he remembers he was the “new kid in town” and she – bless her sensible shoes and lavender costume – gave him work. He knew at once she was never going to “scale the pinnacles of the soprano repertoire” as she imagined; but having carried her bags to base camp (and initially being unbothered by critics), he stayed on.
