Tone-deaf titwillow gag wears a bit thin

REVIEW: Glorious! – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, April 7 to Saturday, April 11).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * *

THAT mischievous musical imp the bum note is probably one of the most unsung, funniest things known to Mankind.

We all laugh when it pops up, don’t we? But the conditions must be right before the gag works. Crucial to this is the requirement of the humour to depend on what might be termed the incongruity factor – but more about that in a moment.

Watching Peter Quilter’s accolades-drenched play on this first night, my mind started to run through the list of luminaries who had put flesh on the bones of this tale about the famously tone-deaf Florence Foster Jenkins.

This terminally tuneless titwillow’s story has been immortalised by such showbiz first division players as Maureen Lipman, Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant… and now at Malvern Theatres by the endlessly effervescent Wendi Peters late of Coronation Street and Eastenders star Matthew James Morrison.

La Peters is an absolute hoot. She struts and strides the stage, squeaking and squawking like some demented starling pecking away at leatherjackets on a rain-soaked summer lawn, while her pianist and mentor Cosme McMoon must stoically put up with every collapsing cadence that gushes forth.

Anyway, more thoughts. It’s now 1974 and I’m suddenly back at that pub talent contest. A Hank Marvin devotee is making an appalling hash of iconic Shadows instrumental Apache, the rafters-raising squeals of mirth pouring from the audience merely serving to worsen the hapless guitarist’s utter misery.

But that’s it, isn’t it? The incongruity of the whole thing, the juxtaposition of the total cock-up within the intended earnest seriousness of the performance. Because that’s how this brand of humour works, as Les Dawson and Tommy Cooper would surely confirm, were they still in the land of the living.

The problem I have with this play is that the endless repetition of the one and only gag – Jenkins sings out of tune all the time – starts to grate after a while. To be sure, Wendi Peters’ character is wonderfully, tirelessly useless at her chosen trade, but it is only the actor’s innate comic brilliance and sense of timing that keeps this show afloat and therefore constantly resuscitating the gag.

Her handling of what I found to be a threadbare script was little short of amazing, the famous Peters gurning chops at times perhaps distracting us from the fact that this actor can actually sing very well indeed. Oh yes - it takes real skill to sound this bad.

Meanwhile, Matthew James Morrison makes a fair fist as long-suffering accompanist McMoon, playing not just the keys, but also stooge to all the screeching and caterwauling.

Nevertheless, we never get to the bottom of how such a consummate musical incompetent hit the showbiz heights during the middle of the last century, on one occasion appearing at New York’s Carnegie Hall, no less. How on earth did that happen?

In fact, according to legend, this extraordinary self-confident, but delusional diva became the toast of the 1940s glitterati, her concerts being attended by numerous celebrities of the day, songwriting giants such as Cole Porter being among their number.

So maybe the sheer, desperate hopelessness of it all, plus the fact that everyone was laughing at her, was all that was needed to do the trick. And clearly, that single, repeated-to-infinity joke never ever wore even slightly thin.