New York Playbill

She's feeling A Touch of the Poet

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More About

• Gabriel Byrne
• Charles Schulz
• Bert Royal
• Stephen Temperley
• Florence Foster Jenkins

For Kids:Moscow Cats Theater.Russians have always taken their clowning seriously and this 90-minute spectacle combines the seasoned physical shtick of MCT founder Yuri Kuklachev and his fellow human clowns with the acrobatics of an animal ensemble of 20 felines and two dogs. In fact, viewers expecting this outing to be mostly cats jumping through hoops are in for a surprise, as much of the performance consists of traditional clown sketches that play out while the cats catch their breath between stunts. The cats ride in Hummers, shimmy underneath tightropes and roll balls, all while Kuklachev and his comrades provide slapstick to a score of 1970s Euro-lounge music. Call it Cirque du Silly. This has proven to be a popular ticket in town and will move from its downtown auditorium in February to Lamb’s Theater near Broadway, making it a good bet for tourist families. Tribeca Performing Arts Center, open run. (800) 432-7250.

Nostalgia:Souvenir.Although this production has announced its early closing at the Lyceum Theater, author Stephen Temperley’s two-hander certainly had its critical and audience partisans. The story opens in a 1964 Greenwich Village bar, where a gay lounge pianist (Donald Corren) takes us back 40 years, when he was hired by Florence Foster Jenkins (Judy Kaye) to accompany her during the many private recitals she held for charity. To the uncharitable, Jenkins was an eccentric society matron who, ensconced in her rooms at the Ritz-Carlton, fancied herself to be a coloratura of the highest talent. In fact, she couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, and her clangorous interpretations of Mozart and Verdi became the hot ticket for New York’s smugeoisie, who, along with the likes of Noel Coward and Tallulah Bankhead, filled Carnegie Hall to gasp, slack-jawed, at her tone-deaf butchering of arias and pop tunes. The play’s “moral center” should be the pianist, Cosme McMoon, a composer who has struck a textbook Faustian bargain — in return for Jenkins’ largesse, he agrees to play along and flatter the grand dame’s malarial delusions. Yet Temperley shows no interest in looking at the corrosive effects of Jenkins’ money on Cosme’s artistic ambitions. Instead, Cosme goes along with the gag, even when Jenkins begins to rightly suspect she is the object of ridicule and not admiration. Just, however, when you think Temperley could — must — finally plunge the dagger into the demented old tabby, he pulls back and has Cosme reassure Jenkins of her talents, retrieving sitcom from the jaws of tragedy one more time. Souvenir is really Sunset Boulevard written as a comedy, making it an exercise in moral finger-painting with disturbing results.