“I’m Judy Garland, now pay me some respect”
The enduring legacy of Judy Garland may be considered the preserve of gay men of a certain age but but what Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow, a play with songs rather than an all-out musical, reminds us is that hers was a tragedy in which all of our increasingly celebrity-obsessed society is complicit. The play is set in the months leading up to her death in 1969, as desperate to pay off her debtors, her new young fiancé and manager Mickey Deans signed her up for a five week run of cabaret shows at The Talk of the Town though as became clear to see, Garland’s struggles made it a very difficult time.
With the press against her, willing her on to ever more scandalous deeds, friends deserting her as her drug dependencies also pushed away four husbands, and a career that was nosediving as a result of all this drama, Deans was banking on this being the comeback of all comebacks. But Quilter shows us through a number of scenes, that the extremities of her behaviour impossibly strained the relationships in her life, even with her devoted Brighton-based pianist Anthony, her body and mind warped by endless years of being a part of the fame game and unable to deal with being chewed up and spat out by the Hollywood machine. Continue reading “Review: End of the Rainbow, Churchill Bromley”