Double Your Pleasure

That is most certainly the case with Naked Stages’ Souvenir, the regional premiere of Stephen Temperley’s poignant, heartwarming story. Laced with plenty of musical spirit and billed as a “fantasia,” Souvenir is an extrapolation based on actual events in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, who launched a singing career well into middle age and became a campy darling of Manhattan’s club-going crowd in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Jenkins couldn’t sing, or at least sing well. Despite her belief that she was “the true coloratura in purity of tone,” her well-to-do parents “actively discouraged” her from pursuing music. After inheriting their money, she took revenge, determinedly performing recitals in the ballroom of New York’s Ritz Carlton hotel.

Jenkins’ highly entertaining tale is told in flashback from the point of view of Cosme McMoon. A struggling pianist and composer at age 29, McMoon reluctantly accepted the job as her accompanist. Endearingly portrayed by Jeffrey Williams—who spends a good deal of the evening seated at the gorgeous grand piano donated by the show’s sponsor, Steinway Piano Gallery—McMoon continually questions his own logic in partnering with Jenkins. But a gig is a gig (as many musicians will attest), and even after absorbing firsthand Jenkins’ perilous adventures with pitch, tone and rhythm, McMoon is won over by her innate (if deluded) charm.

McMoon even starts to humor her—“a vocal artist must claim some...latitude,” he says carefully—and commits to an eventual long-term relationship, which includes concert appearances where audiences clamor for more, precisely because of Jenkins’ cathartically hilarious ineptitude. They cut a few records and even play Carnegie Hall, the latter situation nearly inducing apoplexy in McMoon, especially when Jenkins announces that she wants to include one of his own compositions, “Mexicana Serenata,” on the bill.

Williams, a gifted pianist, is well suited to this role, and he plays quite a bit through the course of the show, noodling stylishly through Tin Pan Alley tunes and excerpts from the more classical repertoire that Jenkins favored (and which also presented her with her stiffest challenge).

But as winning as Williams is, Ginger Newman is an absolute revelation, inhabiting the Jenkins character with consummate skill and total devotion to the role’s guilelessness and naive self-confidence. Newman is well known as a voice and drama teacher at Belmont and Cumberland universities as well as at University School of Nashville. She’s also toured extensively on cruise ships and performed in legit opera, theater and concert venues, but she’s been absent from Nashville’s theatrical circuit for approximately a decade. When director Richard Northcutt suggested mounting Souvenir, producer Mark Cabus responded, “Yes, but only if Ginger Newman plays the role.”

The casting is a huge payoff. It’s impressive just how badly Newman, a standout vocalist, manages to sing throughout the production. Her performance is a marvel of musical control and self-awareness. Outfitted in Ann McBride’s striking costumes—including a series of wildly comic Act 2 getups that Jenkins dons for numbers such as Gounod’s “Ave Maria”—Newman evokes both tangible pathos and an indelible heroism. She also serves up a delicious vocal surprise to conclude this evening of engrossing and genuinely affecting theater.

Brandon Wilson’s set, featuring a stylized archway that frames the action, adds a fillip to our view of Jenkins’ music parlor that, in a way, symbolizes the unusual adventure within.

Meanwhile, People’s Branch Theatre is presenting the Nashville premiere of The Mystery of Irma Vep, which features Brian Webb Russell and Eric D. Pasto-Crosby enacting eight roles in a wild satire written by the late Charles Ludlam (1943-1987). Ludlam, a remarkably dedicated theater artist, focused on the ridiculous, exploiting gothic novels, Hollywood horror flicks and other elements of high and low culture as jumping-off points for his original plays.

Russell opens the proceedings in drag as an aging, gray-haired housekeeper humming “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” He’s at the rather seedy Mandacrest Estate, home of Lord Edgar and Lady Enid, where a portrait of Paris Hilton overlooks the fireplace mantle and strange doings are obviously afoot.

Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”) ultimately works off of the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca, itself based on Daphne DuMaurier’s gothic novel of the same name about the naive second wife of a darkly mysterious widower. There are, however, distinct side trips into werewolves, “madness” and the excavation of an Egyptian tomb. Director Ross Brooks oversees this tongue-in-cheek romp, with its overly dramatic music cues, ominous thunder, puns that lampoon the deadly dialogue, and exaggerated stereotypes that will be familiar to anyone who fancies old movies. (Pasto-Crosby, for example, plays a fez-topped Middle Eastern type named Alcazar in the spirit of Peter Lorre.)