Into Glorious Unknown Territory

Ah, Florence Foster Jenkins - glad to make your acquaintance, madam! For the uninitiated, she was an American amateur operatic soprano who was known, and ridiculed, for her lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, aberrant pronunciation of libretti, and overall poor singing ability. (Thanks, Wikipedia). And she is the subject of Peter Quilter’s (he of End of the Rainbow fame) 2005 play ‘Glorious!’, dramatising the tuneless diva’s later years in the 1940s as she engages the jobbing pianist Cosmé McMoon to accompany her  for her compellingly catastrophic chirruping. 

I had never heard of Ms. Jenkins or Quilter’s play (though I loved End of the Rainbow when it came to Cardiff earlier in the year) and was intrigued when I was approached by Cardiff Players to produce some video backgrounds for their production of it. So, borrowing a copy of the play, I read it en-route to my sister’s house in Aldershot... and got some very funny looks when I was helplessly giggling away to myself while reading it in Leigh Delamere services. It was really rather amusing. And from then on I was hooked.

I was over the McMoon to be invited to join the project and asked if I could be of any further assistance - for instance projecting the images on the night, perhaps. Little did I know what this would lead to; before I knew it I found myself painting props, hanging lights and just generally helping out in the pre-production. 'Glorious!' was proving to be one of the Players most ambitious projects in respect of props, furniture, scene and costume changes, as well as incorporating projected video on a custom made screen. Pretty daunting stuff that came with all manner of challenges, including one truly stressful evening when the digital projector decided it didn't want to be involved thank you very much and malfunctioned. This with only a few days to go before opening night. Luckily, a replacement was found very quickly and proved to be a much better projector with a much brighter image that wouldn't be drowned out by the stage lights. See? Things happen for a reason!

The two sequences that I shot with members of the cast and crew were great fun to do and the results were great, thanks to video capabilities of the Canon DSLR. As well as this, I also got the opportunity to research, incorporate and edit existing archive footage of 1940s New York and Carnegie Hall, create a title sequence (see below) in iMovie and become familiar with the capabilities of the Keynote program which proved invaluable, not only for cueing the video slides but also for creating some rather snazzy intertitles and credits (ultimately not used but were fun to create anyway).

Involvement with a theatre group was all virgin territory for me, but I learned a lot about theatre terminology during this time. For example: you know that flat thing that the actors perform on? That’s a ‘stage’!... ooooh...

Joking aside, the experience has been a steep (and very intense) learning curve for me, but one that has proved to be immensely rewarding. I guess I have never been satisfied just being a passive consumer of entertainment and have always secretly craved to be involved in its production somehow. Like a lot of things in my life, the opportunity came about when I was least expecting it. It also introduced me to some wonderfully committed individuals (that’s not individuals who should be committed) who made up the cast and crew of 'Glorious!' They have been so welcoming and encouraging, and really appreciated what I had created for them. And even though I never actually got to see the performed play (too busy backstage, finger poised nervously over the MacBook’s spacebar) it was a genuine pleasure to be involved in this most fabulous of productions.

To quote Cosmé's last line of the play: "Glorious!"


Here is the opening video, to the strains of the great lady herself singing Adele's Laughing Song from Strauss's 'Die Fledermaus'. It's pretty painful.