Rep Stage’s gracious production of Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins makes you miss many things. Piano players in restaurants and cocktail lounges. Songs that make you shiver with ache, like “Violets for Your Furs.” Day dresses. Velvet hats and matching gloves.
Most of all, kindness.
The relationship between New York socialite and opera doyenne Florence Foster Jenkins (Grace Bauer) and her pianist-accompanist Cosmé McMoon (Alan Naylor) is everything you’d want in an unlikely friendship. The tenderness, the tact and discretion they bestow on one another is a breath of fresh air in this current climate of incivility and intolerance.
In their case, kindness is more than a civilizing force. It uplifts them and transforms them into the best versions of themselves they can conjure.
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Jenkins’ operatic singing brings tears to your eyes (for all the wrong reasons) and apparently she was the cause of much mirth in music circles and to the public at large. She made albums that were bestselling novelty records (a distinction unbeknownst or perhaps unacknowledged by Jenkins, who considered herself an artiste) and played Carnegie Hall in the 1940s to a wildly appreciative audience mostly composed of service men and women.
Read that again. Foster and McMoon performed at Carnegie Hall.
If that isn’t evidence of the power of caring and optimism, I don’t know what is.
Director Joseph W. Ritsch takes a conceptual and dreamlike approach to the genre of the memory play to tell the story of Foster, who was either a wealthy nutcase or a peculiar genius, depending on your point of view, through the eyes of her initially reluctant but steadfastly loyal and decent accompanist. You may recall there was a movie version a few years ago, “Florence Foster Jenkins,” with Meryl Streep in the title role, which emphasized the comedic aspects of Foster’s singing and her relationship with her unfailingly supportive husband, played by Hugh Grant.
Ritsch’s abstract staging is less straightforwardly biographical, fragmented and softened by the vagaries of memory, which plays fond tricks on the recollections of McMoon some years later, where he’s relegated to playing piano and singing (superbly, Naylor has the rich tenor of a much-swooned-over crooner) in a Manhattan boite.
Adam Mendelson’s lighting goes from the bright light of Foster’s music room to a moody purple—the color of purple prose, perhaps—whenever McMoon lapses into reverie about his 12 years with Foster. Time seems to slow, the music turns echo-y and shards of memories scatter like flower petals, or musical notes. “I’m a relic, she’s a myth,” he observes with a skillful skittering of the piano keys.
Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins closes September 22, 2019. Details and tickets
McMoon starts out stunned and offended by Foster’s caterwauling, which the heartily virtuoso Bauer executes with yips, yaps and oofs that sound like a lap-dog squeezed too tightly by its loving master. But her charm and jovial love of music insinuate their way into McMoon’s heart and he eventually becomes her protector and champion.
At one point, he thinks she may be a genius, someone redefining notes and tone. This brings to mind Yoko Ono, veteran of the Fluxxus art movement and the Plastic Ono Band, whom John Lennon ardently believed was the prodigy in their marriage.
In modern parlance, this could be seen as enabling, but the relationship between Foster and McMoon in Souvenir and even the Yoko-John love story was much more than that. These couples display a lost chivalry, patience, and exquisite care that is so ephemeral you wonder if it could even exist today.
They were careful with each other, as if knowing on some level how precious their bond was.
You see this expressed in a scene late in the play, when the mask slips for a brief moment during the Carnegie Hall recital and Foster sees the effect she has on an audience and hears what she really sings like rather than what sounds like in her head.
McMoon, played with old-world gallantry by Naylor, is so courtly as he tenderly steers her away from horror and mortification to a gentler truth. No matter if she sounds like a wet cat or not, the reality is she entertained the crowd and they loved her and lapped up every sour note.
Yes, it’s funny as all get-out when Jenkins performs, bivouacked in Julie Potter’s increasingly rococo costumes (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Bauer dressed up like a Mexican senorita shaking maracas with a tower of red roses in her hair or as the Statue of Liberty using her torch as a gun during her patriotic rendition of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”), and try to reconcile this image of a classic opera diva with the torturous sounds emanating from the perfect “o” of her pursed lips.
Ritsch’s staging of Souvenir is like the nature of the word itself, which in French means “to remember.” There is humor, but it is of the fond, affectionate kind, as if time and memory have softly rubbed the rough edges away and all that remains are traces, echoes of an artistic partnership that defied reason, even artistry, and became something never to be seen again.
Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins by Stephen Temperley . Director: Joseph W. Ritsch . Featuring: Grace Bauer, Alan Naylor. Music Director: Rebecca Echols. Set Design: Mollie Singer. Lighting Design: Adam Mendelson. Sound Design: William D’Eugenio. Costume Design: Julie Potter. Stage Manager: Emily Mallon. Assistant Stage Manager: Aly Tu. Produced by Rep Stage. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
