THEATRE

Off note but on key

Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins is a musical about a tone-deaf soprano

by NEIL BOYCE peeding by with only three

Sperformances

in The Next Wave mini-fest of musical theatre, Stephen Temperley?s 2005 play, Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, is a funny, tender and witty piece that its two actors gobble up. The piece unfolds as a memoir. Cosme McMoon (Chris Barillaro) is playing piano in a dive, recalling his time as accompanist to the most tuneless, least-talented and loveliest singer ever: Florence Foster Jenkins (Nadia Verrucci). In a career that spanned over 30 years, culminating in a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1944, the real-life Jenkins thrilled audiences with her ?unique? renditions of classical arias. Wealthy enough to indulge her whim of opera stardom, the gaudily dressed Jenkins would perform in salons for her society friends, aided by a pianist who would try to make sense of it all. The Rocky Horror of its day, audiences flocked to see the shows as a spectacle-du-jour. She?s had two musicals written about her (the other, Peter Quilter?s Glorious!, was staged by Centaur theatre in 2007), and her few recordings are still available, repackaged in collections like The Glory (????) of the Human Voice and Murder on the High Cs. As Jenkins? accompanist, McMoon begins with the question posed by many over the course of the singer?s lengthy career: ?Why did she do it???to which he adds, ?Why did I do it?? After their first rehearsal together, a stunned McMoon stares uncomprehendingly at Jenkins?she claims to have perfect pitch?who replies, ?You must forgive me if I get carried away and obfuscate the tempi.? But where Quilter wrote the Jenkins story as a farce, Temperley?s ver- LOVABLY NUTS: Verrucci & Barillaro sion shows an eccentric but charming woman with a deep love of music. Verrucci is sublime in the role, filling her character with a wonderful array of tics, gestures, and absent-minded comments?believing in her gift, as McMoon comments, the way that a child might. She?s Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, with a manic smile plastered on her face and a perpetually startled expression, sprinkling her conversation with divalike utterances like mille grazie. Chris Barillaro?s great live piano work added much to the success of the show. ?You see a lot from the piano bench,? McMoon observes, and whether he?s playing a bouncy Cole Porter number or trying to wrestle Mozart?s Queen of the Night aria from Jenkins? death grip, Barillaro was a perfect foil to Verrucci?s excesses?and it?s through his character?s loving gaze that we see Jenkins as more than a joke. Director Stephen Pietrantoni has difficulty sustaining the euphoria built up in the first act?though this is partly a problem with the text?and his direction overall is rather lackluster and light on ideas. Further, Barillaro has a propensity to mug for the audience?wringing out his astonished reactions to Verrucci?s antics. He doesn?t need to: Barillaro?s a likeable and gifted actor-musician who?s best when he reins himself in. It?s the actors who carry it. ?What matters is what you hear in your head? is McMoon?s verdict, and as Verrucci emerges in the finale, she performs Ave Maria as Jenkins must have imagined she heard it: gracefully, sweetly and in tune? capping the story perfectly. ? SOUVENIRAT THE MCCORD MUSEUM (690 SHERBROOKE W.) AUG. 22 AND 27, 8 P.M. TICKETS: (514) 790-1245 OR FROM CETM AT (514) 504-9339

BOOKS

Get shorties

This One?s Going to Last Forever and Selected Blackouts are story collections from two of the city?s best emerging writers

by SACHA JACKSON t?s 1989 and Clara Stewart is an

Iundergrad

at McGill. Fresh from Camrose, Alberta, she finds herself landing a job at The McGill Daily and like a lot of university students questioning her sexuality. This is the basis of Are You Committed?, the featured novella in local author Nairne Holtz?s short story collection This One?s Going to Last Forever. It?s the usual tale: girl moves to Montreal, girl rooms with angry leftist student journalists, girl covers a Take Back the Night March and meets cute lesbian, girl falls for said lesbian, girl questions her sexuality, lesbian breaks girl?s heart. Like the story of sexual discovery, the Montreal that Holtz presents is wholly recognizable despite the fact that it?s set 20 years ago. It?d be great if this feeling of stasis were a wry comment on the pace of development in this city?but it?s not. And it?s not entirely clear why Holtz chose to write about this era to begin with; beyond a musical reference or two, there are few signposts that this is Montreal circa 1989. The one historical event she chooses to focus on (and I use this term loosely) is the Polytechnique disaster. Holtz takes what could have been a way to create atmosphere and mood and instead treats the event rather flippantly as a mere plot device. It?s just a small part of the narrative, but it feels so unjustified and off-handed it has you wondering why it was mentioned at all. What Committed lacks in originality, however, Holtz makes up for in her short stories, which follow the disenchanted, the closeted, the fetishists and usually include some hot sex scenes. This is her territory and it?s obvious she feels more comfortable with this material. ?When Gay is the New Straight,? about a gay Elvis impersonator in Sudbury, and ?Phantoms,? about a recent amputee who finds out she?s now become a fetish, are both standout works. This is where her writing comes into its own, in showing the bedrooms and relationships of everyday people, the queer, the straight, the questioning. Moving from lesbian to dude fiction, Montreal-based John Goldbach?s first collection of short stories Selected Blackouts traverses the blurry line between youth and adulthood. There are no Apatovian man-children here, but darker, tor- tured and inevitably real male characters whose bravado almost always comes into play. ?Blackout? opens with a striking scene, a classroom of boys cupping their necks till they pass out cold on their desks. It?s a harmless teenage prank, but there are deeper undertones here, and even as we follow two of the boys as they spend their suspension smoking hash and drinking beer, there?s an almost menacing atmosphere that pervades the prose. The mood of most of these works captures the feeling of our vast untravelled country roads and the solitude and the unknown that comes with it. Even when the story is set in a city a certain amount of loneliness remains. There?s more quirkiness in these stories than the tone, sparse and direct, begets. The opening story ?Odin Létourneau and Debbie Siskind?s Second Date? talks of one boy?s love for his pet turkey, while in ?Easter Weekend? the protagonist is fond of writing fake suicide notes. The dude-ness isn?t always subtle, though, and things get a bit out of hand with ?Easter Weekend,? which pretty much blows its load of hetero hijinks (strippers, booze, drugs) in 30 pages. ?How Much Do They Know?? is a another testosterone filled selfexplanatory tale in which the narrator rants about his group of friends and the lies and treachery that goes on between them. There are no secrets among friends and this is nothing new. When he gets it right, though, Goldbach nails it. ?Conversation at 4 a.m.? and ?Wedding? are stunning little masterpieces. ? THIS ONE?S GONG TO LAST FOREVER BY NAIRNE HOLTZ, INSOMNIAC PRESS, PB, 226 PP., $19.95 SELECTED BLACKOUTSBY JOHN GOLDBACH, INSOMNIAC PRESS, PB, 172 PP., $19.95 MONTREAL MIRROR AUGUST 20 - AUGUST 26 2009 41

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