>>REVIEW
GLORIOUS!
Runs until November 5
Theatre Calgary and Canstage, Toronto
Max Bell Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Florence Foster Jenkins was a woman gifted with an enviably rare kind of madness: rather than agonizing between delusions and reality, she was able to impose her delusions on the world. Despite being renowned as the worst singer in the world, "the first lady of the sliding scale" was critically bulletproof, believing herself to be one of the finest vocal talents in history.
In Glorious!, currently running at Theatre Calgary in the play’s North American premiere, this delusion is a triumphant story of dreams against reality. In playwright Peter Quilter’s world, Jenkins is a model dreamer: triumphing against all odds, believing in herself and finding a group of friends who will tag loyally along. Like Jenkins’s cult fans, this feel-good journey presents audiences with a challenge that can only be accepted or denied.
Glorious! is unquestionably a crowd-pleaser, light on insight and heavy on absurdity. Faced with this uplifting madness, will you come along for the ride?
As the play’s gateway into Jenkins’s (Nicola Cavendish) mad world, pianist Cosmé McMoon (Jonathan Monro) arrives to find a self-financing heiress-cum-songstress holding court in her overcrowded apartment. Eager to share her "gift" with assembled women’s societies or through a recording of "Adele’s Laughing Song," Jenkins’s entourage includes the likes of her belligerent maid (Maria Vacratsis), thespian beau (Christopher Hunt) and obligatory female friend (Dixie Seatle). Through McMoon’s eyes, we watch first with horror as Jenkins butchers Lakme’s "The Bell Song," and later, with melting cynicism, as the woman’s love of her performance builds to her ultimate performance at Carnegie Hall.
From cynic to adoring fan – albeit one who is still aware that the delightfully horrifying noise coming from Cavendish has almost nothing to do with song – both McMoon and the audience enjoy sadomasochistic pleasure tinged with old-fashioned underdog success.
It is in Jenkins’s atrocious voice that the play finds its driving comic force, both through the caterwauling sound of Cavendish’s untrained, deliberately grating voice and through the attendant madness of the diva’s life. In addition to McMoon’s constant double entendres and evasive wordplay, Jenkins is prone to making too-unselfconscious indictments, like, "The world first heard my voice in 1912 — the year the Titanic went down." Most of the play’s remaining laughs come either from the manic Español ranting of Vacratsis’ Maria or the droll hedonism of Hunt’s St. Clair.
If the play provides one sublime pleasure, it is certainly seeing two comic actors as talented as Cavendish and Hunt sharing the stage. Cavendish’s presence is magnetic, bringing a powerful confidence that appropriately pervades the self-assured Jenkins’s every move. At her side, hamming it up with the decadent British whine that made him such a scene-stealer in ATP’s Treasure Island, Hunt is a wonderfully absurd complement.
In fact, between the comic talent of its cast and Monro’s lively piano accompaniment, it is only in its text where the play falters. Unfortunately, Glorious! is not always a sustained note.
A wasted five minutes with an exhausting litany of compliment cards, an entire scene spent redundantly drilling home the play’s carpe diem cliché in a graveyard, and a condescending epilogue earnest enough to virtually canonize a serene Jenkins in spotlight – there are certainly moments where, just like Jenkins herself, the play simply goes too far. Alternatively, the play refuses to go far enough when introducing a shrill villain (Heather Lee MacCallum) almost as an afterthought for less than an entire scene – a squandered opportunity to provide the tension the play never realizes. Mercifully, Glorious!’s light touch matches its tone more often than not.
In their second co-production of the season, Theatre Calgary’s and Toronto’s CanStage have brought a characteristically indulgent staging to the Max Bell, helmed by TC’s founding artistic director, Christopher Newton. From the furniture-filled space of Foster’s apartment to the flowery stage of Carnegie Hall, set designer David Boechler has created the concentric arches of an amphitheatre’s music shell as the framing for a staging that moves with the life that Jenkins herself embodied.
Light and uplifting, Glorious! is a comedy that takes great joy in celebrating the absurdity and success of Florence Foster Jenkins’s projected delusion. For those willing to accept the fevered optimism of a would-be diva, glass half-full to overflowing, it certainly is a wild ride. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.