Glorious!

Here is an excerpt from the review in The Gazette written by Matt Radz which appeared on Feb 03, 2007:

Let's face it, Centaur, our main anglo stage, hasn't had a runaway smash hit since Mambo Italiano had them rolling in the aisles more than five years and two dozen plays ago. The drought may be over, thanks to a heroically vile American soprano, ... Glorious! hits all the right notes, precisely the opposite of Florence Foster Jenkins, the character celebrated by Peter Quilter's screwball stage biography.
A wealthy socialite, the flamboyantly tone-deaf Jenkins was billed as the Soprano of the Sliding Scale. Her vocal overreaching was likened to the wild wallowings of "a demented cuckoo in its cups." Yet she sold out Carnegie Hall a month before her death in 1944 at age 76, as if to prove that, indeed, money can buy everything, including artistic immortality.

Her costumes - wait till you get a load of Dunsmore fluttering about after she straps on Angel of Inspiration wings - were even more outrageous than the frightfully earnest vocalizing. Jenkins created a show-biz persona so irresistibly bizarre, she counted Cole Porter and Irving Berlin among her many devotees...

Click here to hear how off-beat the original Florence Jenkins really was in Ms. Jenkins MySpace page!

After you have seen the play, write a post in your blog that relates one of the quotes below with Florence Foster Jenkins' real-life success. Read and comment on your classmates' posts as well.

"Truth is stranger than fiction because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

"To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence." --both by Mark Twain

"Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent." --Sophia Loren

"How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life." --Jim Valvano