That (ugh) voice! Tale of Florence Foster Jenkins

Broadway leading lady Ann Crumb has been trying on wings, and not because she's up to anything angelic at the Media Theatre's production of the Broadway show

Souvenir

. "They're very heavy, and yes, you feel like you're carrying something very serious on your back," she says. "You don't feel light, I'll tell you that."

But wings are essential for playing Florence Foster Jenkins, the New York socialite who thought (wrongly) that she was a fabulous singer. That delusion also included costumes, from Spanish to Russian, plus the famous photo of her, glowing beneficently, wings mounted on back, in her self-designed, self-engineered apotheosis (of sorts). It came when she rented Carnegie Hall in 1944 and played to an audience that knew her by reputation and couldn't help but laugh at the chasm between what she thought was coming from her mouth and the shambling reality of the situation.

"What did she hear?" exclaims baffled piano accompanist Cosmé McMoon, played at the Media by Karl Danielsen, at the beginning of Souvenir, which starts its run tonight. From there, he recounts his multiyear relationship with Jenkins, shepherding her through private concerts and attempting to shield her through ever more public displays of her off-pitch, off-rhythm, off-everything voice.

The two-character play by Stephen Temperley opened on Broadway in 2005 starring Judy Kaye, who played the diva-in-her-own-mind much in the spirit of the imperious Margaret Dumont in Marx Brothers movies. Crumb comes to Souvenir from a wide background encompassing Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love on Broadway as well as Unto the Hills, a song cycle written for her by her father, George Crumb.

In her view, Jenkins wasn't cunning enough to be playing an elaborate joke on the public, as some have speculated. "I have to believe that this was her truth, that what she heard was beautiful and that she thought she was giving the music its due," she said recently after rehearsals.

"That's what touches us in the play: There were two truths, the conventional truth, what we know as beautiful, and her truth, which was the music as she heard it," said Jesse Cline, Media Theatre artistic director.

Deciding what psychological ballpark she was in is one thing, approximating the singing another. One reason the Jenkins legend has endured are the recordings, which have to be heard to be believed. Made privately with Jenkins arriving at the studio and doing one-take performances without even warming up, the recordings have been available on RCA almost continually since her death in 1944, recently in improved-fidelity Japanese editions.

The challenge is reenacting singing that was an accident of nature. "I had to learn the music first," Crumb said. "I can't distort it until I've learned it. You can't be off pitch with 'Happy Birthday' until you know it. But what's even harder is having to be out of time. . . . it's very hard not to do it on the beat. It's that old thing of chewing gum and doing this or that."

What comes out of the story isn't just a variation on the emperor's new clothes - no, Jenkins' is one of those specifically American tales, involving the aloof, insular pre-World War II aristocracy with the dark undertones of an Edith Wharton novel seen in a warped mirror.

The DVD documentary Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own, written by Donald Collup and released only months ago on VAI, drops several bombshells about the Wilkes-Barre-born heiress: She was once an extremely promising concert pianist, but around the turn of the century found herself living in Philadelphia in near-poverty.

An arm injury ended her piano career, her family disowned her because of a hasty, defiant marriage, and her husband abandoned her but left a souvenir: syphilis. She taught piano in Philadelphia until she was rescued by her mother, with whom she moved to New York and began the life that led to Carnegie Hall. However, the syphilis treatments cost her her hair and possibly compromised her in other ways late in life.

Another key piece of the puzzle was her fondness for appearing in tableaux vivants - a part of her posh social gatherings. Historical moments were re-created, frozen in time. All Jenkins had to do was stand in costume and accept round after round of applause. Sometimes she portrayed opera characters. The experience amounted to fame and adoration without effort (or talent). From there, the delusion of vocal artistry - which prompted vociferous response, albeit sometimes in the form of stifled laughter - wasn't a long journey.

Inevitably, Souvenir departs from the truth, as any good piece of drama has to. Though the play ends with Jenkins recovering from her Carnegie Hall experience in a reasonably cheerful frame of mind, the VAI documentary states that the more frank reviews of her concert were said to have stunned her. Four days later she had a heart attack.

The primary challenge of producing the show is finding an actress good enough to sing badly and an actor who, like Danielsen, is a genuinely accomplished singer and pianist. Cline admits that Souvenir is only possible when the casting comes first. Crumb, for one, was coming off a knee replacement and a TV mini-series that was in preproduction but ran out of money.

She grew up in Media, and the Media Theatre was part of her upbringing as a movie palace. Between then and now, she got her start in classical theater in Philadelphia, left that to get a degree in speech and language pathology, returned to acting, and found success not just on Broadway but also starring in the London production of the musical The Goodbye Girl.

But there's more to her life than musicals: She's working on a novel inspired by her animal-rescue experiences in Brooklyn Heights, where she's now based, and she watched a casual request for her father to arrange some folk songs for her grow into a whole second career, not so much for her but for him.

"I always love going back to plays. Working at the Wilma Theater a few years ago in Love and Anger gave me back my theater heart," she says. "After you've spent years and years in the commercial world where the pressure is so tremendous . . . it's wonderful to go back to what you want theater to be, which is the work - without all that money riding on it."

One possible danger with this specific play, though, is that Jenkins' willfully rosy world can be strangely alluring. In the play, accompanist McMoon admits he actually came to like her singing. That's not likely to happen to Crumb, if only because of the play's final moments - a surprise ending that audiences will discover in weeks to come.

Listen to David Patrick Stearns discussing Florence Foster Jenkins at http://

go.philly.com/

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