Gloriously Bad

Murder on the high Cs: Nicola Cavendish plays singer Florence Foster Jenkins, a real-life American soprano who became famous for her lack of singing ability, in the Theatre Calgary production of Glorious! (Brian Harder/Theatre Calgary)

Long before TV shows like Canadian Idol allowed us to wallow in the exquisite awfulness of bad singers, there was that infamous “diva of din,” Florence Foster Jenkins.

No mere fly-by-night mediocrity, Jenkins (1868-1944), an eager but hopelessly inept American soprano, built a whole career out of unintentionally butchering beautiful music — from opera arias to English folk songs — while gathering fans in the process and actually packing out Carnegie Hall. At the pinnacle of her improbable fame, in the mid-1940s, she even charmed real artists like Cole Porter, who may have admired her chutzpah as much as they relished the sheer ludicrousness of her performances.

Now Nicola Cavendish, arguably Canada’s funniest stage actress, is set to embody the world’s worst singer in Glorious!, a frothy comic ode to Jenkins by British playwright Peter Quilter. Already a hit in London’s West End, where it made its debut last year, the play is receiving its Canadian premiere from Theatre Calgary and Toronto’s CanStage this fall in a production directed by former Shaw Festival boss Christopher Newton.

For Cavendish, a non-singer, playing the vile vocalist would seem to be a snap — until you consider that singing opera badly is a far cry from crooning your favourite Elton John ballad out of tune. Jenkins, a glass-shattering soprano if ever there was one, could hit the high notes all right, she just hit them unerringly in the wrong places.

“I think I’ve met my Waterloo!” jokes Cavendish during a recent telephone interview from her Calgary hotel suite. Although it’s only 8:30 a.m. — an ungodly hour for anyone in the acting trade — she sounds as ebullient as ever, if understandably anxious.

Nicola Cavendish. (Brian Harder/Theatre Calgary)

“I’m one of those wacky actors who has always flown by the seat of my pants and worked with spontaneity and impulse,” she says. “But in order to muck up these songs, I had to begin by learning how to sing them properly. And the high, high notes that Florence Foster was infamous for, oh, my gosh, they really would peel the skin off a camel. They are so high! I was terrified from the word ‘go.’”

Fortunately, she’s had a first-class opera singer, friend and fellow Vancouverite Judith Forst, to give her a crash course in how Jenkins’s mangled arias are really supposed to be sung. Still, despite the vocal challenge, Cavendish says she couldn’t resist playing such a fascinating comic character.

“She has this unmitigated gall, she has courage, she has heart, and she has belief in herself,” says Cavendish. “And for me, that’s the most appealing aspect of this role.”

Quilter’s play, which began life at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2005, provides a generous portrait of Jenkins as an indomitable spirit who may have committed “murder on the high Cs” (to borrow the title of one of the various CD compilations of her work) but who also had an enthusiasm for music that no cranky critic could squelch.

“This is a play about fulfilling dreams,” says Newton, sharing his thoughts in a separate interview. “Florence has a moment [in the play] when she says even singing badly is better than not singing at all. She shows us that if you want to do something, do it. And she did it to the highest degree.”

Jenkins’s determination may have come from the fact that she wasn’t able to live her dream until late in life. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania banking family, she was discouraged by her parents from pursuing her musical ambitions. But after they died and she inherited a fortune, she made up for lost time. She founded musical societies, supported musicians and finally, at age 60, embarked on a performing career of her own, using her money to make records and give lavish recitals at swank venues like the ballroom of New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Not content to merely assault her audience’s ears, the elderly diva would also don ridiculous costumes, from a Spanish senorita’s garb to an “angel of inspiration” outfit complete with wings and halo, in which she would trill the likes of Valverde’s “Clavelitos” and Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. Although aware that some people came to laugh at her, she seems to have been convinced that she was a serious artist — which made her even funnier.

Quilter’s play recreates those absurd performances as it follows Jenkins during the last year of her life, from recording sessions and galas to Carnegie Hall, where, at the age of 76, she made her legendary sold-out debut-cum-swan song. Helping her along the way are a couple of real-life figures: Jenkins’s manager-boyfriend St. Clair Byfield, portrayed here as a failed but jovial English actor (and played in this production by Calgary favourite Christopher Hunt), and her accompanist, a young gay pianist with the wonderfully fey name of Cosmé McMoon (Jonathan Monro). Joining them are Dorothy (Dixie Seatle), Florence’s friend and fellow amateur, who dabbles in arts and crafts, and Maria (Maria Vacratsis), a temperamental Mexican maid.

With her oddball entourage, the incompetent singer recalls Ed Wood, the reputed worst filmmaker in the world, who attracted a curious mix of people to create such juicy turkeys as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Newton finds the comparison delightfully apt. “Florence also seems to collect around her people who feel that they’re on the outside,” he says. “She becomes an icon for other people who want to do something, and who bask in the glory of this woman who follows her dream.”

And when he says “glory,” he isn’t being entirely ironic. Nor was Quilter when he called his play Glorious! “The title has this kind of divinity echoing behind it,” notes Cavendish. “It’s about reaching for something that might be unattainable, but there’s glory in the doing of it.”

Unlike Jenkins, the 54-year-old Cavendish’s considerable reach has seldom exceeded her grasp. And her remarkable talent was recognized from the get-go, Newton being among the first to spot it. As artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse in the 1970s, he hired her fresh from the University of British Columbia, casting her against type in Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

“She was so interesting that I gave her all the young-girl parts,” Newton recalls, “even though she’s not the kind of sylph-like actress that is normally cast as Ophelia or Eliza Doolittle. I thought she was too great an actor not to do those roles. And she did beautiful, beautiful work.”

Cavendish went on to star at the Shaw Festival during Newton’s long tenure there, as well as on Broadway and at theatres across Canada, most memorably as the emancipated Liverpool housewife in the touring Canadian production of Shirley Valentine (1989-92) — a much-loved performance that she revisited for Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre and Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre in 2003-04.

As with Shirley Valentine, Cavendish first heard about Glorious! via a friend who saw it in London and thought she’d be perfect for it. Having taken a hiatus after starring in the stage adaptation of Carol Shields’s novel Unless — “A very hard play, for lots of reasons,” she says — the actress was ready to jump into a work of pure comedy. She approached CanStage about doing it, CanStage talked to Theatre Calgary, and a co-production was born.

Since she started rehearsing the play in Calgary (where it’s premiering, followed by the Toronto run), Cavendish says it’s revived her comic energies. “It’s been pure medicine in the rehearsal hall. We laugh and laugh. And I’m eternally grateful for that; it’s filling up my barrels again. I’ve gone from drained to bountiful.”

For his part, Newton is happy to be back with Cavendish, making gloriously bad music together. “She’s such an amazing comic actor,” he says. “She has fantastic timing and a great enthusiasm. She’s rather like Florence, from that point of view — she loves life.”

Glorious! runs until Nov. 5 at Theatre Calgary and Nov. 20 to Dec. 16 at CanStage in Toronto.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

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