Search YouTube for all of 12 seconds and you’ll find a clip of Judy Garland on The Mike Douglas Show from 1968, roughly a year before her death at the age of 47. In it she reminisces about old movie roles in between songs, perched clumsily against a piano, fussing with her dress, throwing the extravagant trim over one shoulder – ‘I know I’m going to breathe the feathers’. All at once she seems focused, jittery, ever-present, and not there at all. Like anyone in decline, for better or for worse, but mostly for worse, no matter the strength of her performance, she’s endlessly watchable.
Just as watchable is Peter Quilter’s biographical work about Garland’s final months, End of the Rainbow – more a play with music than a musical play. In early 1969, Garland (Christen O’Leary) arrives in London for a five week run of cabaret shows. At first resistant of the booze and pills on which she’s been previously dependent, and anxious about her comeback to a comeback, she leans as much on her new, young fiancé, Mickey Deans (Anthony Standish) as she does on her pianist and devotee Anthony (Hayden Spencer). We stay with Garland, pacing her ‘too small’ hotel room – a Ritz suite by designer Bill Haycock that is so glimmering and lush you’ll question if he was given a budget at all – before we’re transported to nightclub, Talk of the Town – aided by a live, six piece band, who are basically faultless under Musical Director Andrew McNaughton – and the stage is set for Garland’s last remaining musical flubs and triumphs.
Is it any wonder this play was first produced after Mickey Deans’ death in 2003? He’s remembered here as, ultimately, a vicious enabler of Garland’s self-destruction. Standish gives us a restrained, honest and deeply unflattering Deans, with an even less flattering haircut. As the other man in Garland’s life, Spencer’s loyal accompanist is possessed by his adoration of the legendary star. Somewhat strange though is the character’s need to remind us in every scene that, shock horror, he’s gay. His sexuality is used as a punch line once too often early on in the piece, but Spencer reigns in the character in an incredibly tender scene before the final curtain. And what can you possibly say about Christen O’Leary without sounding like her publicist or her lover? Her every movement is a lesson in Garland, but her performance is nothing textbook. O’Leary can curse and shake wildly and then shift into a trapped bird-like stillness, before launching a soaring version of ‘You Made Me Love You’ or ‘The Trolley Song’. If there’s a better performance than O’Leary’s in Brisbane this season, we’re in for a very good year.
Director David Bell has said he wants the audience to witness Garland’s humour and resilience – not just the tortured soul we’re so blindingly familiar with. When O’Leary first appears, all innuendo and flailing arms, you feel the kind of unexplainable affection that you’d usually reserve for only your most obnoxious friend. It’s such a relief Bell gives us time to first see her at her best, before peeling back the layers and exposing her at her fragile worst.
Judy Garland was dead before they put a man on the moon. It’s hard to imagine. Between ritualistic family viewings of The Wizard of Oz at Christmas, the endless biopics and biographies and nightclub drag tributes, she’s never disappeared from popular culture. Quilter’s greatest achievement is making us miss someone we’d only before known from a tabloid distance. Queensland Theatre Company’s End of the Rainbow once again draws Garland from black and white to glorious technicolour, from untouchable camp idol to unforgettable human of flesh and blood.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Queensland Theatre Company and Queensland Performing Arts Centre present
End of the Rainbow
By Peter Quilter
Directed by David Bell
Designer: Bill Haycock
Lighting Designer: David Walters
Musical Director: Andrew McNaughton
Cast: Christen O’Leary, Hayden Spencer and Anthony Standish
Playhouse Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
2 – 24 March
