Peter Quilter
Hope Mill Theatre, Thomas Hopkins Productions and Jana Robbins
Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester
27 February - 4 March, 2025: 2 hours
You have to be good to sing badly well: I’m not the first to say that, but it’s true. In other words, to make a bad musical performance really funny, you need to know how to do it properly and then add some (think Les Dawson and even Eric Morecambe).
Wendi Peters has got it – she knows her stuff musically, and she certainly knows how to make bad singing sound hilarious. Florence Foster Jenkins, the American amateur soprano who paid for herself to give recitals and make recordings and finished up filling Carnegie Hall in 1944, at the age of 76, only a month before she died, was allegedly so bad that people simply came to laugh
This show, seen in the West End in 2005 starring Maureen Lipman, is her “true story” – as related by her unusually (but historically accurately) named accompanist, Cosme McMoon. There are just three performers: Peters as Jenkins, Charlie Hiscock (in his theatre debut) as Cosme McMoon, and Anita Booth in the three roles of her Italian cook/housemaid Maria, her adoring fellow-socialite Dorothy and her nemesis, the musically knowledgeable Mrs Verrinder-Gedge.
But there’s been a great deal of genuine musical expertise in this production by Kirk Jameson, with composer-conductor Nick Barstow as musical supervisor and performer-teacher Mark Goggins as sound designer; before the show and during the interval we hear recordings of the music Jenkins attempts to sing, from Die Fledermaus, Carmen and The Magic Flute. I don’t know whose they were, but if nothing else they hint at the idea of singing by imitating recordings. And in the musical numbers the accompaniment provided by McMoon comes over as very good piano playing, even if he did have to transpose many of Flo-Fo’s numbers down a lot, including Der Holle Rache (or Dee Holler Rarchee, as she puts it), where the story of her claim to have expanded her range to the top F as a result of a traffic accident is faithfully re-told.
Wendi Peters has the task of presenting a figure who really was larger than life, and probably rather deaf (syphilis, acquired when she was young, is thought to be the real explanation of Flo-Fo’s performances). She’s up against Meryl Streep’s grand dame interpretation in the 2016 film (not of this play, but covering the same story). Peters must sing very loudly – that’s part of the fun – and she acts loud, as divas do; I think there might be a bit of Dame Edna Everage in there, too, mixed with Miss Piggy from The Muppets.
Each of the performers is highly impressive. Charlie Hiscock gets many of the best lines, and delivers them just right; he’s the show's Mr Normal, after all, and becomes its hero as he devotes himself to Florence’s welfare; encouraging her, as all accompanists do, that “I’ll be right there for you”, whatever happens. And Anita Booth is a tour de force in all three of her characters.
This is comedy with a heart, though. Performing, at whatever level, means laying one’s soul bare in public, and Glorious! reminds us that it’s true; there will always be brickbats as well as bouquets, whatever the level of technical ability.
We might reflect that the wartime America in which Florence Foster Jenkins had her brief moment of fame was very different from ours: with men away at war, the arts world was dominated by wealthy married women with time on their hands. Government support not forthcoming, it was all about private clubs and conspicuous donation.
But some things haven’t changed. Having money was seen as kind of moral virtue topping all others; people were gullible - name another country in which snake-oil salesmen have been so successful; and loudmouths were always able to get their way.
That’s the Land of the Free.
More info and tickets here
