With a Song in her Heart

"People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing."

--Florence Foster Jenkins

Photo: Chris Bennion

Courtesy ACT Theatre

ACT Theatre in Seattle is doing a run, over the next month, of the Broadway play Souvenir. The play is based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy heiress who devoted her life to music, and in particular, to the performance of soprano arias.

Over a career of three decades, she gave annual performances to the cream of New York society at the Ritz-Carlton ballroom. During World War II, her performances became more frequent, with the proceeds going to the war effort. She released a number of albums on major labels. She reached the peak of her career in 1944, at the age of 76, giving a stunning performance of her most famous arias to a sell-out crowd at Carnegie Hall. A month later, she passed away, serene in her sense of a life well led.

Florence Foster Jenkins, as Wikipedia accurately describes her, possessed a "complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability." Her fame was, and is today, based entirely on that very lack.

Souvenir depicts the decades long relationship between Foster Jenkins and her long-suffering piano accompanist, Cosme McMoon (played by Mark Anders). Patti Cohenour, who portrays the diva most admirably in the ACT production, has been quoted as saying that she needed lengthy periods of intense practice before she could duplicate her character's unique style of singing. The uniqueness of that style became instantly apparent to all members of the ACT audience, the instant she reached for the opening high note of her first aria, Caro nome. Hearing her inimitable presentation, we were all equally in awe, regardless of our prior acquaintance -- or lack of acquaintance -- with the operatic canon from which she selected her numbers.

It was easy to ridicule Florence Foster Jenkins, and in her lifetime, many did. But she was blessed with infinite self-confidence, single-minded love of music, and a lifelong desire to share the beauty of song with her friends and fellow music-lovers. Even in her one moment of self-questioning, she mused that what was truly important was how the music sounded in her head -- not how it sounded to her audience. In her head, she heard the divine music of the spheres; she had the rare, obsessive determination that others should hear it as well.

In the end, after the applause died away, we walked slowly from the theater, shaken by the realization that we go through life only once, and that surely it is far better to risk ridicule reaching for the stars than to sit silently at home, our dreams locked within us, out of fear of seeming foolish.

No one's life seemed more foolish to audiences of the 1930's and 40's than that of Florence Foster Jenkins. But she passed away, again quoting Wikipedia, "with the same happy, confident sense of fulfillment that pervaded her entire artistic life."