Patricia Kilgarriff plays Florence Foster Jenkins in Glorious!

Looking back at the 1940s from the era of YouTube and American Idol, it’s clear that Florence Foster Jenkins, an attempted operatic soprano, was merely ahead of her time. Here was a woman with enough money and determination to pack hotel ballrooms with sympathetic listeners from her ladies’ clubs (who may have come to offer support, or merely to cackle quietly into the linen).

Turning a tin ear to her own atonal warbling, Jenkins dismisses her critics in Glorious!, a biographical comedy now playing at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. "People may say I can't sing,” she declares, “but no one can ever say I didn't sing." And sing she does, as doggedly and as terribly as any of the sacrificial wannabes booted during the first round of Idol auditions. The results, happily, are just as indulgently funny.

Glorious! starts with an able script by playwright Peter Quilter, but as so often happens on stage, the script implicitly demands that the performers transcend the writing, as some side bits amount to little more than running gags. The maid Maria speaks only machine-gun Spanish – yes, yes, there’s a language barrier. Chuckle. The aging sauced neighbor Dorothy (a pitch-perfect Joan Porter), has a dog prone to lying supine on full indecent display. Titter. The pianist Cosme (a consummate Darren Dunstan) is both the straight man and anything but, weaving around and through many a double entendre about his sexuality. Giggle.

Riffs on upper-crust New Yorkers who abuse both liquor and the help with casual aplomb are only as hard to find as Will & Grace DVDs. What we expect from Glorious! is the rarer treat of hearing Florence caterwaul. This calls for exceptional comedic ability from the lead actress. She must convince the audience that she is singing to the outer limits of her talent – and that those limits extend only to the intersection of ghastly and plausible.

Fortunately for this production and for anyone in Little Rock who likes to guffaw in public, this Florence positively nails it. From the moment Broadway veteran Patricia Kilgarriff flexes her vocal cords, reaching up to butcher entire upper registers, it becomes clear that all else in Glorious! is merely prelude and postscript to those tortured notes. They are hilarious, and Kilgarriff brilliantly sells the heart of the part: a woman who wants nothing more than to be loved as a songstress yet disregards all criticism, second-guessing and rehearsal. “I am blessed with excessive volume,” she admits in what amounts to Florence’s version of modesty. She’s all in, all the time.

Her version of Adele’s Laughing Song from Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, belted out in the second act, is an acoustic version of Duchamp’s mustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa: a spoof of a canonical artwork that will leave you everafter smirking at the original. By the time Florence truly arrives by singing to a packed house in one of New York’s most venerated venues, Mozart’s Magic Flute is waiting for her like a comedic weapon of mass destruction. That climax is as funny as you’ll ever see in a musical, on film or on stage, in Arkansas or anywhere else. It hits all the wrong notes in exactly the right way.

Glorious! continues through March 28. For ticket information click here.  To check out the Rep's 2010-2011 season click here.