When Art Collides With Mediocrity

At one point, it’s all too much for Cosme McMoon, the pianist and songwriter who has been hired to prepare one Florence Foster Jenkins, a woman of means but seemingly little sense, to prepare for her first singing recital.

Jenkins cannot sing in tune; her voice is charmless, inflexible and piercing with ugly head tones and ugly chest tones, too. When she sings Caro Nome, from Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” “There’s a want of accuracy,” McMoon declares. But not until she lists the Queen of the Night aria in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the one with the F above high C, does he despair.

“Am I in the presence of delusion or dementia,” he wonders.

He soldiers on, however. He needs the money and, anyway, something in him wants to protect her. And improve her.

“A note is an absolute,” he tells Jenkins, but she brushes him off and dismisses “this modern mania for accuracy.” She may be “shocking the Bechstein” below his fingers (actually a Yamaha in this case), but Jenkins says she sings from the heart, and we believe her.

The playwright, Stephen Temperley, keeps McMoon, somehow, and the audience, too, reasonably tolerant. Priscilla Squiers plays the soprano (a real person) who truly believed audiences loved her. She does not expect them to do otherwise. And you might want to strangle her, but you would never want to hurt her. Jenkins may be deluded. But she wants all the world to love her music. (She does have some idea about her capabilities, though, because she bars the press, a hateful bunch she says, from her private recitals.) 

Greg Chrzczon plays McMoon with a mix of pain and patience, but he quails at her plan to perform in Carnegie Hall, “where Galli-Curci and Heifitz” once performed. Of course Jenkins perseveres. She ignores McMoon and  plans a different costume for each of the 24 numbers. A huge audience filled with notables turns out. “I’m leaving a lovely souvenir of when my voice was at its best,” she tells McMoon.” In any case, “Art cannot be ruled by caution.” 

The play has a striking finish: In her final number, wearing a white angel dress and feathery halo, it’s clear she sings for every person in the world who is not gifted at what they love to do.

“Souvenir” runs at TheatreWorks New Milford through May 23. For tickets and information, call 860-350-68      63 or go to theatreworks.us.