BWW Reviews: Hilarity and Heartache Vie in SOUVENIR

Portland Stage's second production of the season, Stephen Temperley's witty and poignant memoire about Florence Foster Jenkins, Souvenir, whisks the audience back and forth between hilarity and heartache. The two-character drama told from the perspective of Mme. Jenkins' longsuffering accompanist, Cosme McMoon, traces the collaboration between the pianist and New York socialite and would-be opera diva, Florence Foster Jenkins, who delighted audiences - for all the wrong reasons - with her colorful recitals from 1932-1944.

Mme. Jenkins' whose legendary "sound" was preserved on 1944 recordings that continue to have to this day a cult following, used her considerable wealth to give recitals for charity, including an unforgettable Carnegie Hall performance which becomes the penultimate scene in Temperley's play. Mme. Jenkins' singing can only be conjured up by imagining that Arnold Schoenberg has arranged Mozart or Verdi and that bel canto has become an atonal assault of flats, sharps, howled cadences, run away tempi, and grotesquely mispronounced foreign languages. Through it all until the very end of Temperley's comedy, she does not hear the laughter nor see her self as the object of ridicule, and so the tension between McMoon's all too mordent grasp of reality and Mme. Jenkins' blithe delight in the music she hears in her head gives the play its irony and depth.

Temperley treats his characters with affectionate understanding. As the struggling, once idealistic pianist, McMoon, grows increasingly disenchanted and self-deprecating as the play advances and his career remains mired in this farce. An inherent honesty and searing irony do not desert him so his character never descends to pathos, and he is ultimately capable of the redeeming quality of true compassion for his "patron" and friend. His portrait of "Mme. Flo" is equally nuanced and winning so that while we smile and have the luxury of laughing aloud, we are also drawn into her world of alternate reality - a quixotic place where there is only beauty. The last scene, a kind of dream vision where Jenkins finally sings Gounod's Ave Maria as it should be sung, is a heartfelt reminder that every human being carries within him his own individual truth.

Ron Botting directs with a keen sense of timing and a musical ear for the language and structure of the play. As Mme. Jenkins, Karen Murphy gives a virtuoso performance, never exaggerated, but crisply comic and subtly human, and as a singer she masters the difficult feat of murdering the music audiences know and love. Wayne Barker makes a sympathetic Cosme McMoon, bewildered and sarcastic by turns, and he gets to demonstrate his musicianship not only as a pianist, but as a lively interpreter of the popular upbeat tunes interspersed throughout the script.

Anita Stewart's effective set surrounds a Steinway grand and period chair on a bare stage with a series of rotating panels that suggest the music room in Mme. Jenkins' Park Avenue apartment or the white and gold paneling of Carnegie Hall. She then allows projections of 30s and 40s New York to do the rest. Beth Goldenberg has great fun in recreating some of Jenkins' famed costumes including the iconic getup - a white satin gown, feathered headpiece, and archangel wings - in which the "diva" sang her Carnegie hall "Ave Maria." Gregg Carville's lighting is suitably subtle, and Seth Asa Sengel provides the embracing sound design.

As it did last season in Words By: Ira Gerswhin and the Great American Songbook ,the Portland Stage Company demonstrates its special affinity for this kind of small-scale play with music. In its intimacy, Souvenir reaches powerfully into the hearts of its audience, bringing to life memorable characters and raising provocative issues about the meaning of art, the perception of reality, and the dichotomy between the voice in our head and the voice we project.

Photos Courtesy Portland Stage Company

SOUVENIR runs October 28- November 16, 2014, at Portland Stage Company, 25A Forest Avenue, Portland, ME www.portlandstage.org 207-774-0465

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