Meryl Streep, having nothing left to prove as a serious actress, has been taking on musicals lately. She’s done the big Broadway take with Mamma Mia! and the rock musical take with Ricki And The Flash. And now she’s destroying opera as the most notoriously bad singer of all time, Florence Foster Jenkins.
Jenkins was a socialite utterly convinced she was the grandest soprano of her age. And to be fair, people showed up in droves to watch her sing. She had a celebrity fan base, she toured the world, she did everything a good singer would do. However, the experience of watching her was best described by William Meredith:
[It] was never exactly an aesthetic experience, or only to the degree that an early Christian among the lions provided aesthetic experience; it was chiefly immolatory, and Madame Jenkins was always eaten, in the end.
But really, why read about it when you can watch the clip? The deleted scene is interspersed with Streep’s vocal coach, who reveals that singing like a cat slowly falling off a roof into an alley full of starving dogs is a lot of work, since you have to be quite a good singer to figure out how to sing badly while still being funny. But mostly it’s just inspirational watching an Oscar-winning actress, esteemed across the world and any medium one can perform in, sing like a broken kettle.
(via YouTube)
