‘End of the Rainbow’: Where Dreams Really Do Come True
Gershwin wrote “Rhapsody in Blue,” Picasso painted Le Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Babe Ruth knocked another one out of Yankee Stadium. But wait. There’s another risk taker you may not know about — yet. Her name is Tracie Bennett and she’s playing Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow at the Belasco Theatre on 44th Street. It’s a performance of a lifetime, and you miss it at your own risk.
The “drama with songs” as envisioned by playwright Peter Quilter, arrives in New York from a critically-acclaimed run in London, followed by its American premiere in January at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. With Terry Johnson, the 2010 Tony-award winning director of La Cage aux Folles at the helm, all the sparkle and sheen we’ve come to expect seems assured, but without Judy, the right Judy, all bets are off.
According to Johnson, Garland became “an innate part” of Ms. Bennett, a character she has played off and on for over a decade, notwithstanding a more fictionalized version in a London pub production. Though she is a two-time Olivier Award winner and a veteran of London’s West End, she has described herself as “a former chorus girl who is finally being offered her big break.”
From the second Ms. Bennett struts upon William Dudley’s lavish but tastefully-appointed set, we’re prepared for all hell to break loose. It’s December 1968 and Judy has taken a suite of rooms at London’s Ritz Hotel with her fiancé Mickey Deans. With his period sideburns and tightly flared pants, this DJ turned wannabe husband number five thinks he has control over the situation — “thinks” being the operative word. Tom Pelphrey does his best to play the compliant Ken doll but Anthony, her longtime accompanist, knows what a poseur he really is, even if Judy does not. Played by Michael Cumpsty with an understated authority laced with compassion, he is the steadfast, gentle soul that will weather the tempest of her tirades.
And what tirades! She uses the set as her personal playground, splaying herself across the nearest chaise lounge — whether for dramatic effect or because of sheer exhaustion — lifting herself up, just as quickly to leap atop the grand piano, waving through an open window to her fans below. When she doesn’t get her way, searching frantically for the amphetamines — her “grown up candy” that she thinks will save her, or a drink—she becomes a wild beast. And just when you think you’ve seen it all before, she breaks into song, breaking your heart in the process.
If you were expecting a few bars from the tinkling grand piano upstage, you’re in for a surprise. Through the wizardry of Christopher Akerlind’s lighting and set designer Dudley’s own lightning-quick transformations, the stage goes dark, the hotel window fades to a six-piece orchestra platform, and the proscenium is framed in white lights. We have been transported “Just in Time” to the Talk of the Town nightclub and our star in all her red-spangled glory. It is no small miracle that we, too, have changed — from guilty voyeurs of Judy’s private persona to the enthralled live audience and her performance.
There are more songs to come, before and during Judy’s crushing descent, and the playwright was wise enough to give us some of the best, aided by Gareth Owen’s sound design, Chris Egan’s orchestrations, Gareth Valentine’s musical arrangements, and Jeffrey Saver’s music direction. “The Man That Got Away,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “The Trolley Song” are all there, but each becomes another mountain for her to climb. During one particularly excruciating performance at the club, she manages to mix up her song cues and to get herself hopelessly tangled up in the microphone’s cord like some mad marionette.
Will she make it? Even if we already know the answer, we’re still rooting for that silver lining.
In Ms. Bennett’s all so capable hands, feet, and lungs, we see a Judy that’s not going down without a fight. “You could have shoved cables into me,” she blurts at one point, “and I could have powered up Manhattan.” In the next breath, she turns that razor-sharp wit on herself: “My chin and tits are in a race to my knees.” In yet another more maudlin moment, she reveals her ever present vulnerability: “I don’t want to be loved out there, I want to be loved down here.”
How does Ms. Bennett do it? She’s a petite woman (as Garland herself was, at a mere four-feet-eleven), and barely older than Judy was when she died of an accidental Ritalin overdose at 47. She moves with an acrobat’s skill and a teenager’s energy across the Belasco’s imposing stage, each inflection, each gesture, and each glance spot-on. This isn’t imitation. It’s alchemy. She owns the part.
As a play, it serves its star. It’s a pastiche of one-liners, machine-gun repartee, and broken connections. Her leading men seem to wait from beat to beat for Judy to fire up that three-way trolley car they’re on. Interestingly enough, one of the most fully-realized sequences in the play happens when Anthony, in a last-ditch attempt to rescue Judy from the train wreck of her life, offers marriage. For him, it’s solace along with a little cottage somewhere in Scotland where no one will recognize her. The moment is all the more poignant given that he is a gay man, offering calm, not passion, to a human tornado.
Perhaps sensing a need to fill in the blanks of Garland’s demise for a younger audience, Anthony is given the last unhappy chore of providing a funereal footnote to the proceedings. We learn that over 20,000 fans filed by her coffin, along with a laundry list of celebrities. Cumpsty is up to the task, but is this really the end of the rainbow?
Hardly — Judy, a wounded bluebird, gives us the final “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” we’ve been waiting for. Tracie Bennett came back, as Judy often did, for an encore. Nobody left their seats.
“End of the Rainbow” opened at the Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, New York, NY on April 2, 2012. For ticket and show information visit www.telecharge.com or by calling (212) 239-6200.
