The Simple Love of Art: An Interview with Judy Kaye

It is delightfully ironic that an actress and singer renowned for mastering almost every genre of music is now earning rave reviews as a woman who cannot sing. In Souvenir, the new play by Stephen Temperley enjoying its premiere at the York Theatre, Judy Kaye misses every musical note she tries to hit, but scores an emotional bull's-eye as a woman so blindly in love with singing that she cannot see the truth in front of her: she has no musical talent at all. Playing Florence Foster Jenkins, whose albums from sixty years ago are still in print, and whose final concert sold out at Carnegie Hall, Kaye combines her impressive skills for comedy, drama, and song to play what may be the most challenging role in her career.

Despite playing an actual person from history, the creation of Florence the character had surprisingly little to do with Florence the historical personage. "She's a mystery," Kaye says of the basis for her character. "There's not a whole heck of a lot that's actually known about her.... What I know is what others know, and the rest of it is dreaming. 'If I were a wealthy lady who had a dream, what would I be like?' Which," she considers, "is what an actor has to do, anyway, at the end of the day. You do all the research that you can, and then finally it becomes whatever you can imagine."

Kaye read contemporary articles and reviews about Jenkins, but ultimately, she had to find the character within herself rather than in the meager pages of old newspapers. The emotional center of Jenkins, she found, was the lady's unshakable conviction in herself. "She believed with all her heart that she was a great musician," Kaye says. "She believed in what she was doing, and ergo, I believe in what I'm doing." With this connection forged, the rest of the character slowly emerged from the page. "They teach you, in acting school, how to ask those questions," she says thoughtfully. "It's not dissimilar to what a writer asks– the 'who, what, when, where, how?' kind of thing. An actor asks the same questions. 'Who is this person? Where do they come from? Why do they do the things they do? What do they want?'" Building that background helps create a three-dimensional character on both the page and the stage, and makes that character's journey complete and compelling. "That's how we proceed, always, whether it's a wildly wacky comedy or a very intense drama. It's the same thing."

To play the musically ungifted Florence, Kaye had to make some very specific musical choices. "Sometimes she's flat, sometimes she's sharp, sometimes she actually hits the note and can't hold it and falls off of it and gets back on," she says, and adds that purposefully singing against what was written is "like singing jazz: I've got the melody, and I'm taking some different paths, divergent paths away from the main, singing riffs." Preparing to sing any kind of music, be it rock, jazz, showtunes or opera, requires the same basic vocal techniques. Playing with music and sound, she says, is akin to a dancer's many options in playing with movement. "You go to the barre and you do your ballet warmup, and then when it's time to do Fosse-type jazz, you bend your body in other ways, but you can always come back to that center... And then you can diverge from it. You can go off and make stylistic choices that are different– to do jazz, or to do rock, and bend sound, and play with sound."

Not only does Kaye the singer have to focus on making specific musical mistakes, Kaye the actress must focus on not making comic mistakes at the same time. "You have to listen to the audience, you have to have an awareness of what the audience is giving back to you," she says with the wisdom of a skilled comedienne. "If they're laughing, you can't say a line in the middle of their laughter, or they'll never hear it. This is a technical thing! You have to wait till the laugh crests, and then... go over the top of the laugh so that they'll hear the next line, and hopefully that will lead them to the next laugh."

Kaye has great praise for Stephen Temperley, the playwright who has spent more than twenty years developing Souvenir. "It's a wonderful piece of writing," she says enthusiastically. "You walk in and you're totally unprepared to be moved the way you are... That's the way I felt when I read it the first time! I went, 'Oh, my God, I've got to do this! I hope they let me do this!'" Indeed, after a career of almost four decades and numerous accolades and awards, Kaye considers this role to be her pinnacle. "There's a good possibility I have never had a role like this one," she says. "This may be the best part I have ever, ever played. It is so completely fulfilling!" She smiles, amused. "The irony of it is that it's not a musical role. I'm not furthering the plot with song. This is an acting role. This is just a wonderful, wonderful acting role. And I've never had anything like it, truly. I'm so proud to be doing this play, I can't speak!" She laughs, having spoken at length about her admiration for the play, but then grows solemn again. "It's so special. I really feel that way. I cherish it. This is one of those wonderful surprises that happens once in a lifetime. I feel like this is a tremendous gift that Stephen Temperley has given me, and all to follow." She leans in closer, her eyes gleaming with intensity. "I've had a lot of friends come in, some wonderful theatre friends, and they've all been tremendously moved by the play. One of them even called it a parable. He said he was going to go home and look at himself in the mirror and see [if] he was deluding himself in a way." That, she says, is the emotional connection between Souvenir and its audience. "This [play] tells the story of all of us, in our own ways, in our own lives, of how we maybe delude ourselves." Ultimately, however, at its heart, the play is about "the simple love of art, the simple love of something, caring that much about something, and following a dream."

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