SOUVENIR Opens Bridge Street Theatre's 2017 Subscription Season
By: A.A. Cristi Mar. 02, 2017
On October 25, 1944, wealthy (and tone-deaf) soprano Florence Foster Jenkins and her accompanist Cosme McMoon performed a recital at Carnegie Hall. Tickets sold out weeks in advance; an estimated 2,000 people were turned away at the door. The world of music has never quite recovered. Come share the hilarious and touching tale of this unlikely pair in the musical "Souvenir" at Catskill's Bridge Street Theatre March 16th through the 26th.
Opera impresario Ira Siff, who dubbed her "the anti-Callas", has said, "Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater ... There was no end to the horribleness ... They say Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad." The historian Stephen Pile ranked her as "the world's worst opera singer". "No one, before or since," he wrote, "has succeeded in liberating themselves quite so completely from the shackles of musical notation." Appearing in the cast of this co-production between Bridge Street Theatre and Fort Salem Theater (who will present the production in Salem, NY this July) are soprano Alison Davy as Florence Foster Jenkins and pianist Jay Kerr as Cosme McMoon. The musical production is directed by Flo Hayle.
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