an incautious overdose of life
by Douglas Messerli
Peter Quilter (author, with music once performed by Judy
Garland) End of the Rainbow / Los
Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre / I performance I attended was a matinee on March 30,
2013
Peter Quilter’s play about the last
months of Judy Garland’s life—as the beloved and decaying performer made a
final singing engagement at London’s Talk of Town, accompanied by her fifth
husband, former band leader and club manager, Mickey Deans (Erik Heger)—is
little more than a series of documented and rumored events strung together with
witty bon mots, mostly centered on
Garland’s alcoholic and drug addicted condition: “It’s all about gravity. My
chin and tits are in a race to my knees.” Other than Garland, perhaps the
central figure might be said to be her piano player, the Scottish born Anthony
(an excellent Michael Cumpsty), who as a gay man begins the play with an
self-conscious contempt for the aging star (although she was only 47 at the
time of her death), with whom he had previously shared a disastrous performance
in Australia (“It was a blood bath”), but whom increasingly comes to feel for
the terrified woman, who in Mickey Deans has again chosen the wrong man to
love. Anthony ends his time with her by proposing an asexual marriage in an
attempt to take her away from the circus of her life, although he seems shocked
by her question of whether or not they might share a bed. Garland, this play
asserts, was distinctly a sexual being.
To give him credit, Deans begins the play with a strong attempt to make
over her life, managing it the best he can (the couple have hardly any money
left) while forbidding her drugs (checking in every possible cranny in which
might have hidden them) and denying her alcohol. But gradually it is apparent
that in order to literally get her on stage, he must return to the regimen of
the studio heads of her early youth: “amphetamines to pep her up and
barbiturates to make her sleep.” Behind her fiancée’s back, Garland acquires
retinol and escapes, after once performance, into a drunken night on the town.
There is obviously no controlling—as Garland herself makes clear—someone sick
of being put on display and determined to end her life. A few months after the
end of her 1968 engagement, on June 22, 1969, she was found dead in a rented
London home, the victim of, as the British doctor understatedly described it,
“an incautious self-overdose.”
Except for a scene in a BBC studio where Garland answers questions in an
outrageous manner and cannot even remember some of the questions she’s asked,
most of this sometimes fascinating, but at heart rather repetitive drama takes
place in a palatial room (which Garland represents it as being small as a tomb)
of the Ritz Hotel.
But then this small documentary-like retelling has something else going
for it: Tracie Bennett. As an uncanny like Garland stand-in, Bennett is quite
literally an engine of motion, twisting her lithe, small-body into so many
positions that, at times, one might almost think that instead of being
flesh-and-bones Bennett, like Gumby, is all rubber. Whether jumping upon the
room’s grand piano, suffering in pain on its couch, or crawling upon the floor
in supplicant pleading for everything that has been kept from her, the actor is
in near constant motion. In one scene, after grabbing a bottle pills—and
quickly swallowing a couple—intended for Anthony’s pet dog to cure its mange,
Bennett performs as a dog, on all fours, comically barking and lifting her leg
high in the air in mock-peeing upon her “captors.” With all this almost
frenetic action, it is amazing that the actor can stay in character, let alone
continually convince us, as she does, that she is Judy Garland. Unlike many drag queens, however, Bennett does not
so much try to sound like
Garland—although I’d swear at times she’s channeling the diva’s voice—but
convincingly moves the way Garland might. Even at the most neurotically pitched
number of the evening (“I’m Gonna Love You, Come Rain or Come Shine”) the actor
seems less intent upon capturing Garland’s exaggerations, than she is in
expressing the tensions of the singer’s inner demons and outer attempts to
please her audience. It is, as she puts it, all in the acting rather than in
the imitation. I have read that Garland, like Bennett, a small person, would
stand behind the curtain before going on looking like a timid rabbit terrified
at what she was about to attempt. Then suddenly she would take deep breaths,
puffing herself up so that she suddenly looked taller and absolutely powerful
as she entered the stage. So too does Bennett accomplish something similar,
belting out a chorus just when you would have thought she had, in the previous
moment, emotionally spent herself.
As the play, often quite cleverly, transitions from the hotel room to
her performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub, where Bennett belts out
Garland favorites in a strong voice that is so dead-close to Garland—or at
least similar to Garland’s own best imitator, her daughter Liza Minnelli—the
audience was absolutely stunned. Through the clever machinations of these
scenes, the audience’s spontaneous and often rapturous applause simulated the
audience applause of the original performances. Bennett’s Garland, like the
singer herself, may not quite be up to Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall
achievement, but they come damned close. While we obviously know Tracie Bennett
is not Judy Garland, the actor, as if by magic, truly convinces us that she is
a simulacrum—in that word’s primary meaning, “an image”—of the real thing.
There is perhaps no better example of what literary critics have long described
as readers and audiences “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Yet even if Bennett’s rendition of
Garland weren’t so “dead on,” her performance would still be a kind of miracle.
If you think of her hotel room movements as a sort of kinetic dance, put
alongside her great vocal outcries (Bennett declares that she cannot really
sing), one might say that this actor is one of the best musical performers
alive. After the show, my companion Howard and I tried to remember all the
numerous live-theatre moments in which we had witnessed what he might describe
as true greatness: I won’t list all of those, but they included the couple of
times we’d seen Barbara Cook live, Faith Prince in the revival of Guys and Dolls, Elaine Stritch in her
one-woman show At Liberty, Carol
Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Angela
Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, John Hurt
in Krapp’s Last Tape…several others,
all performances you knew you’d never forget until stricken with dementia or
Alzheimers. We agreed that we would have to add Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow to our somewhat
meaningless compilation.
Los Angeles, Easter 2013
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).
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