When Schadenfreude Was the Rage

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Schadenfreude is one of the least noble but most prevalent phenomena in theater, if not in life. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that Broadway audiences stared open-mouthed at the sight of Suzanne Somers having her way with songs like “Pick Myself Up” and “If I Only Had a Brain”? And what about the theatergoers currently gawking at “In My Life”? Just one block east of “In My Life” resides Stephen Temperley’s “Souvenir,” one of the odder and more frustrating Broadway productions in recent memory.


Mr. Temperley has somewhat perversely created a play, albeit a historically accurate one, packed with songs performed as poorly as possible. Unfortunately, he shows far more insider knowledge than narrative dexterity in unearthing the performing career of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York socialite and lover of what she termed “good music” usually coloratura soprano arias – who sold out a series of vocal recitals in the 1930s and 1940s despite (or perhaps because of) her total lack of singing ability.


By the time Jenkins (played by the captivating Judy Kaye) played Carnegie Hall in 1944, the band of friends who had suffered in polite silence through earlier recitals at the Ritz-Carlton were outnumbered by less benevolent audiences. These new crowds (which included Cole Porter, Noel Coward, and Walter Winchell) barely suppressed their laughter as the oblivious Jenkins brayed and gasped her way through Mozart and Verdi.


Everyone, it seems, was in on the joke except for Jenkins, who genuinely believed that she had a moral obligation to share her perfect pitch and who misinterpreted the stifled shrieks of laughter as signs of deep emotion. Her efforts have won her a spot in the so-bad-they’re-good pantheon, with recordings released posthumously under titles like “The Muse Surmounted” and “Murder on the High Cs.”


Mr. Temperley and director Vivian Matalon tell this odd tale through Cosme McMoon (Donald Corren), Jenkins’s longtime accompanist and ineffective vocal coach. Cosme is presented as a man of discerning musical taste, and through his multiple asides to the audience, we see how his willingness to take Florence’s money and offer the occasional bit of coaxing (“I’m hearing a certain want of … accuracy”) evolves over 11 years into a mixture of contempt, bafflement, affection, and envy.


Messrs. Temperley and Matalon clearly want the audience to share Cosme’s feelings, but they haven’t found a way to replicate the shock he and his fellow listeners must have felt. Judy Kaye, a Tony-winning musical theater veteran of some 30 years, attacks Florence’s coloratura arias with a pickax. But because we know full well Ms. Kaye is capable of delivering the goods, we’re not laughing at someone who can’t sing, as audiences did in 1944. We’re laughing with someone who can sing beautifully but is choosing not to – a big difference.


As if to compensate for this, Mr. Temperley plays a sneaky trick near the end of the concert that takes up much of Act II. After two hours of encouraging the audience to laugh at Jenkins’s deluded warblings, he implicates audiences both past and present by depicting the moment when Jenkins finally realized that her “fans” (ourselves presumably included) were actually mocking her. But again, since we haven’t really done any harm, why would we feel guilty? Our superiority toward the talentless Jenkins merely switches over to superiority toward those who hurt her feelings.


But again, since we haven’t really done any harm, why would we feel guilty? Our superiority toward the talentless Jenkins merely switches over to superiority toward those who hurt her feelings.


Mr. Temperley flirts with the potentially interesting idea of a skilled composer finding little success while his talentless patron sells out Carnegie Hall. But is Cosme actually any good, or is he simply displaying a milder form of artistic self-delusion? What does he get out of this pairing beyond money? Does he identify with her? Is he hiding behind her “success”? The play never makes these questions clear and, worse, makes no real effort to address them. And Mr. Corren’s resolutely superficial performance never attempts to resolve the question for Mr. Temperley.


In fact, the most unfortunate irony of “Souvenir” is that Ms. Kaye gives her unusual character an imperious but nonetheless heartfelt dignity, while Mr. Matalon lets Mr. Corren stuff the role of the Everyman, the audience surrogate, with a seemingly endless arsenal of mannerisms. As the play’s emotional stakes rise, Mr. Corren – who, to be fair, accompanies Ms. Kaye’s caterwaulings with the graceful flexibility of a rodeo cowboy – retreats deeper and deeper into hysterics. The scenes where Cosme addresses the audience from a 1964 piano bar are by far the play’s weakest (“Singing is a kind of dreaming in public. But were we headed for a nightmare?”), but Mr. Corren does them no favors.


Cosme entertains the idea at one point that Florence has actually “discovered some new kind of form,” and, for a while, Ms. Kaye turns the tone-, rhythm-, phrasing-, and dynamics-deaf numbers into atonal tours de force worthy of Meredith Monk or Yoko Ono. But a certain sameness creeps into the proceedings less than halfway through the Carnegie Hall concert. (The concert featured a new costume for every song, a fact that lets Tracy Christensen’s elegant costume design rise to humorous heights.)


Ms. Kaye is plausibly and memorably terrible – her guttural attack on a syncopated downbeat is delicious – and I’m not sorry I saw her do it. But I was far more impressed with her fanciful yet moving portrayal of a woman who hears beautiful music when she opens her mouth, all evidence to the contrary.


As comical as her arias are, Ms. Kaye’s Florence is not laughable. She is proud and condescending and a little bit sad. But who out there wouldn’t prefer to hear what she hears? Sadly, it would take a similar amount of will to look at “Souvenir” and see anything but a missed opportunity, a character study that has a frustratingly hard time staying on pitch.


***


Audiences who enjoy sharing in the artistic oddities of yesteryear have a bumper crop of options in the art world. No fewer than three current exhibits, led by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” traffic in the surprisingly fertile world of doctored photographs of the supernatural.


And just as Ms. Kaye has revivified Jenkins’s similarly frightening song stylings, this summer’s Fringe Festival saw downtown-theatre favorite Todd Robbins, best known for his sideshow homage “Carnival Knowledge,” pay tribute to Victorian-era spiritualism with his “Dark Deceptions: The Seance Experience.” Simultaneously ludicrous and delightful, “Dark Deceptions” got hundreds of jaded Fringegoers to hold hands, close their eyes, and squeal with glee at a battery of cheapo paranormal effects.


Surely the Met or one of the other two galleries (they are De Lellis and Burgin, with the latter’s show assembled by historian and sometime stage performer Ricky Jay) can harness Mr. Robbins’s neo-huckster brio and introduce a new audience to its offerings through a “Seance Experience” of its own?


Open run (149 W. 45th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-239-6200).


The New York Sun

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