Theater Review:

The name Florence Foster Jenkins probably holds little weight among serious opera fans. And who can blame them?

Although a success during her 12-year career in the 1930s and ’40s, the attention-starved soprano was unable to carry a note. However, she consistently drew sell-out crowds for her tone-deaf renditions of operatic standards from the likes of Brahms, Mozart and Strauss, among others.

Although her performances were viewed as a joke by her fans and peers, Jenkins was thoroughly convinced of her own greatness and approached each recital with poise and dutifulness.

“Souvenir,” which is playing at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank, is a hysterical telling of this unlikely soprano’s rise to fame.

Cosme McMoon, Jenkins’ longtime accompanist and ardent supporter (if there ever was one), narrates her story from behind a piano. It’s 1964, 20 years since “Madame Flo’s” death from heart failure, and there’s the sense that his career has been in limbo for quite some time. He plays a few of her favorite numbers, but unlike his former boss, McMoon can hold a note. McMoon is reminiscent on this particular evening and recalls his first meeting with the woman who would soon turn all of New York’s high society on its head.

Flashback to 1932, and McMoon is summoned to New York’s prestigious Ritz-Carlton. It’s there that a wealthy woman with an “unusual” voice awaits. At first Jenkins seems like a pleasant old woman who has been blessed with a certain amount of confidence and security. “I have perfect pitch,” she tells McMoon, and I’m sure he was just as curious as the rest of us to see what she was capable of. Then she opens her mouth and well — awful is not a strong enough word to describe what comes out.