The Theatreguide.London Review
Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london
The Theatreguide.London Review
End of the Rainbow
Trafalgar Studios Winter 2010-2011
This will be a
bit of a minority report. The audience loved this show and its star
Tracie Bennett. I admired it and her with reservations.
Peter Quilter's drama-with-songs, seen earlier in Northampton and, in a
different production, the 2006 Edinburgh Festival, is a sympathetic look
at the decline and fall of Judy Garland.
Quilter focuses on one of her last major cabaret appearances, at
London's Toast of the Town in 1968. We see her in her hotel room,
backstage and onstage, being respectively unsteady, panicky and
glorious, while her fifth-husband-to-be Mickey Deans and a fictional
composite pianist try to hold her together.
Its central revelation, which can't be news to many, is that a lifetime
of drug and alcohol dependency made Garland unable to perform or even
function without chemical aid, so that Deans, who begins the play by
lovingly trying to keep her away from pills and drink, is driven to
providing them just to get her onstage.
A show like this depends almost entirely on its star, and I found Tracie
Bennett uneven. As a singer she captures Garland's style, phrasing and,
with considerable help from the sound engineer, the timbre of her voice
remarkably well, and she does the familiar spread-legged stance and
flailing arms perfectly - but then again, so can every drag queen in the
world.
And that is the biggest reservation I have about Bennett's portrayal of
Judy on and offstage. She doesn't especially resemble Garland, even with
the wig, so her portrayal is dependent on external imitation, and at
times she isn't doing Garland as much as impersonating a drag queen
doing Garland.
Her offstage Judy also has touches of Phyllis Diller, Bette Davis,
Elizabeth Taylor and even Liza, so that we're too much aware of an
impressionist at work rather than being brought fully into the
character.
In the course of the play we see Judy singing sober and doped to the
gills, and the actress who played her in Edinburgh, Caroline O'Connor,
made it clear that while the performances were different, Judy was
magnificent even when she was hardly conscious.
Bennett
chooses to play the doped-up Judy as stumbling around and barely
functional, a legitimate and more touching (and probably more accurate)
portrayal, but one that captures less of the special quality that made
Garland a legend.
Stephen Hagan is adequate if more-or-less invisible as Mickey, while
Hilton McRae is droll as the pianist who stands in for all of Judy's gay
fans, and then chilling as we see that his (and their) adulation is also
a leeching drain on her waning mental and emotional resources.
Gerald Berkowitz
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