E-Mail This Article to a Friend Come back little diva Souvenir in Stockbridge, Bus Stop in Williamstown BY CAROLYN CLAY

Two plays featuring chanteuses of a bygone America are on view in the Berkshires this week. The Berkshire Theatre Festival has Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir (through September 3), a "play with music" that recalls the vanity career of soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, who in 1944 triumphed at Carnegie Hall despite not being able to carry a tune in a bucket. Mounting Jenkins’s assaults on the Muse is Tony winner (for The Phantom of the Opera) Judy Kaye, whose own musical credentials range from Broadway to New York City Opera. Up the road, Williamstown Theatre Festival revives William Inge’s 1955 Bus Stop (through August 28), whose tattered Kansas City nightclub singer, Cherie, was made famous in the 1956 film by Marilyn Monroe. Here she’s undertaken by budding film star Elizabeth Banks, who brings to the role a similar mix of innocence and soft sex appeal.

In the hands of director Vivian Matalon, the irresistible Kaye, and actor/pianist Donald Corren, Souvenir is both a caterwauling delight and a tribute to undaunted delusion. The show, which enjoyed a successful Off Broadway run last winter and is headed for Broadway in November, is framed as a reminiscence by Madame J’s aurally brave if eccentrically named long-time accompanist, Cosme McMoon, whom we meet 20 years after "the dire diva of din" has gone to her reward (just one month after the sold-out appearance at Carnegie Hall). He appears at a grand piano, before a squat blue chamber whose window glitters with a New York City skyline, offering an upbeat rendition of Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer’s "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)." He then proceeds to the start of Memory Lane to offer an amazed yet tender portrait of the wayward warbler who whacked her way, using her larynx as a machete, through such high hurdles of the repertoire as the Queen of the Night’s Aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Adele’s Laughing Song from Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus.

In Temperley’s fictionalization, McMoon, at first appalled by his proposed collaborator’s wavering pitch, aberrant intonation, and complete lack of musicianship, comes to admire her "unique kind of sound" (second-raters, he notes, all sound alike) and the sheer scale of her delusion, which he likens to that of the Chrysler Building. As Daniel Dixon noted in a 1957 article about Jenkins in Coronet magazine, "It was self-deception carried to outlandish extremes — but it was harmless and gentle and, in its own weird way, magnificent." What’s magnificent about Souvenir, which could have been just a campy exercise in making fun, is how it accords Jenkins a sureness and a single-mindedness that, though built on a foundation of bullheaded tone-deafness and sand, are indeed heroic.

And the genius of Judy Kaye is not that she manages to sing badly, ricocheting between car alarm and sick cow and using a technique she likens to jazz riffing while making all the wrong choices, but that she renders a Jenkins who is sublimely silly yet indomitable. (Yes, the singer does get a benedictive moment in which to show her own pipes to advantage.) Trotting on a series of chic period pumps, her hair perfectly marcelled, her solid figure erect in elegant matron wear, or strutting her musical stuff in a parade of hilarious get-ups by costume designer Tracy Christensen that includes a Mexican variation on the dirndl, a spangled green military uniform, and Jenkins’s trademark "Angel of Inspiration" wings, Kaye presents a woman slightly dotty but dignified.

A hideous singer yet a font of on-stage joy, Kaye’s Jenkins exudes the rapturous charisma that made the real Jenkins the darling of famous musicians, her fellow moneyed dowagers, and cognoscenti alike. And Corren’s McMoon is a superb foil, whether making up to an insulted Jenkins with a variation on "Crazy Rhythm" or reacting to a particularly piercing coloratura trill as if knocked back from the piano by a Jedi laser. This may not be music to soothe the savage breast, but it abuses the ear while touching the heart.

Meanwhile, Williamstown Theatre Festival revives that arguably sappy artifact of mid-century Americana, Bus Stop, giving the highway-diner-set drama a fleet outing more reminiscent of a greyhound than a Greyhound. Director Will Frears has trimmed the three-act play so it can be performed without intermission, the breaks bridged by the Grand Ole Opry sounds of the Stanton Family Band, a four-person combo who comment on the action from a side balcony. And the director has assembled a fine cast that cuts through both the sentiment and the Wonder Bread whiteness of what goes on when the snow kicks up in Kansas and a (small) busload of passengers must pass some revelatory time at a diner presided over by freewheeling owner Grace and bright-eyed high-school helper Elma.

Chief among the wayfarers are the self-dubbed Cherie, who was trying to escape an ardent cowboy when he abducted her and forced her onto a bus headed for his ranch in Montana and the altar, and her cocky pit bull of a suitor, 21-year-old rodeo rider Bo Decker. Also on board: Bo’s guitar-picking cowboy guardian, Virgil; drunken English professor manqué Dr. Gerald Lyman; and amiable bus driver Carl, who aims to charm more from restless Grace than a sandwich. Keeping the stranded in line is that tough voice of reason and right Sheriff Will Masters, who’s happy to wallop you with life’s lessons if you don’t want to swallow them with your coffee.

Bus Stop is not a great play, but it does offer a plaintive snapshot of all-American lonesomeness set against a backdrop of the vast Midwest. WTF specializes in revivals of such landmark American dramas, and it usually does them proud. Here, under huge letters that spell out DINER, the little greasy spoon (designed by Takeshi Kata) is a hardwood haven whose plate-glass windows reveal an endless vista of nothingness punctuated by swirling snow and the phone lines. Thrown together, the characters bristle with energy and naïveté, save for the rumpled Dr. Lyman, in Bill Camp’s superbly nerdy and disheveled rendering an endearing lost soul spouting Shakespeare and cynical self-loathing.

Daniel Oreskes is a stony sheriff, John Douglas Thompson a playful Carl, Leon Addison Brown a temperate Virgil, and Elizabeth Marvel a frankly humane Grace. Laura Heisler’s eager high-school hash slinger is a standout. Banks’s Cherie, braving the elements in her threadbare strip of a stole, is a vulnerable creature, despite a few trips around the romantic block. And as Bo, Logan Marshall-Green (of The OC) is a firecracker in denim, practically exploding with cocksureness and childish frustration at not getting the chattel he wants. But even such a skilled cast can’t make a strong case for Bus Stop, which mostly proves how much less hopeful a nation we’ve become since Inge pulled into his rest stop 50 years ago.