Writer: Peter Quilter
Director: Kirk Jameson
In 1940s New York society, Florence Foster Jenkins was a renowned figure. An heiress with a passion for music, she hosted fundraising soirées that included her own operatic performances. Unfortunately, even though she was an enthusiastic coloratura soprano, her zeal was not matched by any tunefulness. While she had fans, including such musical luminaries as Enrico Caruso and Cole Porter, Jenkins was renowned for her own inability to hold a tune.
Peter Quilter’s play Glorious! debuted in 2005, the same year as his other musical biography End of the Rainbow, which catalogued the last days of Judy Garland. Where that play (due to be revived later this year at Soho Theatre Walthamstow) was prepared to explore the psychology of its subject, Quilter’s exploration of Florence Foster Jenkins deals much more with surface comedy.
Wendi Peters delivers a firecracker of a performance as the diminutive singer, a woman whose sense of personal space seems as wayward as her vocal ability as she welcomes new accompanist Cosme McMoon (Matthew James Morrison) into her apartment. As she bustles around the stage, there’s more than a little of Patricia Routledge in her performance, infused with gobbets of both Hinge and Bracket.
Beside her, Morrison doesn’t get a huge amount of opportunity for character growth. We get snippets of his backstory – a Chicagoan who is eking a living by playing background piano at a restaurant, hidden behind the salads, and who really needs the money Jenkins is willing to pay him. Still, he is less of a caricature than Caroline Gruber’s Spanish maid, or Sioned Jones as Florence’s socialite friend, Dorothy.
Everything is in service of Peters’s portrayal, which really kicks into gear as she begins to sing. It takes an experienced, highly proficient singer to sing quite as comedically badly as Peters does here. There is a certain amount of glee to be had with such an accomplished singer portraying a woman who did to the human voice what Les Dawson did to the piano.
But while Florence’s off-tune arias are the stuff of comedy gold, they are also the same joke repeated throughout. As the action shifts from Jenkins’s apartment to a recording studio and, later, the stage of Carnegie Hall, everything is geared toward increasingly tuneless arias. From Adele’s Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus to the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, Peters always hits the right note – or rather, the most perfectly wrong one.
There is little else to Quilter’s portrayal, though. What avenues for emotional depth they may have in the script are chamfered off by a directorial attitude that focuses on the purely comedic. There’s a sense of sadness in Jenkins’s life – an early marriage to an older man from whom she contracted syphilis, a condition which may have led to partial deafness and even her tone deafness. References are also made to the potential of the socialite’s inherited fortune being at risk of running out, which comes to nought.
There is also a sense that the opulence described in the script is unmatched in this production. Descriptions of a stage filled with flowers are at odds with the smatterings of bouquets which we see, and although Ingrid Hu’s costumes do their best to portray the outlandish extremes to which Jenkins would dress, there is a sense that this touring production never quite achieves an effective portrayal to match Peters’s best.
Still, the comedy moves along at a cracking pace, ensuring that the single joke that forms the backbone of the piece does not outstay its welcome. Glorious! may not quite live up to its title. Nor does it quite have the self-belief that powered Florence Foster Jenkins even throughout her worst performances. It’s still great fun, but there is a sense of glory missed.
Runs until 21 March 2026 and continues to tour
