Saturday, April 29, 2023
Social Hour at 5:30
Dinner at 6:00 (catered by Tre Kronor Restaurant)
Show at 7:00
Held at the Swedish American Museum
5211 N. Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois
The Society’s spring program was a wonderful event, with over forty people coming together to enjoy a lovely meal and the original theatrical production entitled “Jenny Lind Presents P.T. Barnum.” Many thanks to Tre Kronor for catering and to Shelley Cooper for coming to perform!
Who is Jenny Lind?
Known as one of the finest singers of her time, Jenny Lind found great success touring Europe in the 1840s. Born Johanna Maria Lind in 1820, Lind began studying at Kungliga Teatern in 1830. Just a few years later, in 1838, she earned her first lead in an opera as Agathe in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. Her career as an opera singer, though, was short. On May 10, 1849, Lind gave her final opera performance. It was not, however, her final musical performance. In fact, Lind would spend the next 30+ years touring, performing concerts throughout Europe, and, for a brief time touring the United States under the promotion of P.T. Barnum.
Phineas Taylor Barnum, noted hoax-promoter and co-founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, approached Lind in London with a lucrative offer to tour the United States in 1850. Lind, already famous throughout Europe, accepted. Her tour would cement her fame on both sides of the Atlantic. While the tour earned Lind a windfall, most of which she donated to charities, she eventually tired of Barnum’s exploitative business practices and split from the unscrupulous showman.
Live Performance by Shelley Cooper
It is this moment, the lead-up to Lind breaking with Barnum, that Shelley Cooper presents in her one-woman operetta “Jenny Lind Presents P.T. Barnum.” Cooper is assistant professor of theatre arts at Augustana College and an award-winning performer. She recently won Best One Woman Show for her original performance “La Divina: The Last Interview” at United Solofest.
“Jenny Lind Presents P.T. Barnum” is Cooper’s most recent work. This hour-long operetta presents to the audience Lind’s last performance and her back-stage dealings with Barnum as she quits the tour. Directed by Dr. Michelle Crouch with costume design by Megan Hoppe, the operetta was made possible by an Augustana College Wallenberg Grant.
Rave Reviews and More!
Already, Cooper’s original work re-presenting Lind’s relationship with Barnum has garnered rave reviews. Samantha Simmonds-Ronceros, reviewing the February 3 world premier of “Jenny Lind Presents P.T Barnum” at Whitefire Theatre’s Solofest in Los Angeles, writes that “[Cooper] develops these wonderful stories, with mesmerising performances of fascinating, beguiling musical women who ignore the stuffy world around them and forged their own unique paths, despite and perhaps even because of the adversity.”
Cooper’s work, as Lind, presents the complexities of Lind’s life experiences while amplifying her voice in defiance of the famously loud-mouthed Barnum. A fascinating woman, forging her own path as Simmonds-Ronceros writes, Cooper’s Lind is an important historical addition to what we know, and think we know, about Lind.