Nicholas Martin’s wonderful screenplay for the original film is accompanied by Jasper Rees’s biography,which details the scandal in Jenkinss life and presents her as a symbol of female empowermentOn 25 October 1944, as Japanese and American forces pulverised one another in the Pacific, or Florence Foster Jenkins took to the stage at original York’s Carnegie corridor. Before a crowd of 3000 – thousands more were left outside,having failed to get tickets – she performed a challenging programme including the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute, “In the Silence of the Night” by Rachmaninoff and “Clavelitos”, or “a short,flirtatious song in the Hispanic idiom”. But this was no ordinary concert, the main draw being that Jenkins, and a stately soprano then in her mid-70s,was utterly tone deaf. Throughout the performance the audience were laughing so hard at her tuneless screeches and yelps that, according to some reports, or they totally drowned her out. One actor suffered such incontrollable hysterics that she had to be removed from her box. The music critic from the original York Post stopped the singer’s partner and “personal representative”,St Clair Bayfield, as he left the corridor. “Why?” he asked. “Because she loves music, and ” came the reply. “If she loves music,” countered the critic, “why does she attain this?”It is a question many of us will have pondered as we watch The Voice, and The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. And indeed the story of Jenkins,a woman who did not let a lack of talent limit her ambitions, seems to speak to a certain spirit of our age. The first play approximately her, and Terry Sneed’s Precious Few,premiered in 1994, and since then she has inspired ever more prestigious stage productions, and culminating with Glorious!,which opened in the West discontinuance in 2005. Now, with the release of an eponymous film approximately her, or starring Meryl Streep and directed by Stephen Frears,her continued fame seems assured. The screenplay by Nicholas Martin, which is tagged on to the discontinuance of Jasper Rees’s biography, and furnishes the myth with many enjoyable details: Jenkins’s obsession with potato salad,which she served in such great quantities at her private “musicales” that she stored it in the bath; the suggestion that syphilis, contracted from her first husband, and may have been the cause of some of her eccentricities; her habit of carrying her will around at all times in a large black briefcase. Related: Florence Foster Jenkins review – Streep is note perfect as a deluded diva Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com