End of the Rainbow

Synopsis

December 1968 and Judy Garland is about to make her comeback...again. In a London hotel room with her young new fiancé at her side, Garland battles with a tornado of drugs and alcohol as she undertakes an exhausting series of concerts at the Talk of the Town to try and reclaim her crown as the greatest talent of her generation. Despite a series of failed marriages and a wrecked Hollywood career, Judy remains a tough, compelling, remarkable woman always armed to the teeth with her legendary razor-sharp wit.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 6 September 2011

We know the end of the story. We even know how its heroine got there. But it still grips. We still wish that the ending could have been a happy one. It is a measure of Tracie Bennett’s marvellous performance as Judy Garland, both histrionically and musically, that one follows every nuance of her last London season as though the story was new-minted.

William Dudley’s set of an opulently international hotel suite opens up to become the night-spot – complete with band. Bennett puts over the famous numbers with conviction, her microphone lead seeming to symbolise the coils of addiction which tripped up her career. The scenes in the hotel, ever more chaotic as her latest fiancé (and manager) and her accompanist try so hopelessly to control her, switch effortlessly from raucous farce to bitter-sweet calm.

If Peter Quilter’s script provides most of the words, it is the performances of Norman Bowman as Mickey Deans, all 1960s bouffant ha...

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