First the good news: drag queen and trans Broadway star Jinkx Monsoon has an astonishing voice, a huge presence and has got Judy Garland’s vocal and physical mannerisms down pat, in this revival of Peter Quilter’s play about the star’s infamous last London appearance, months before her death in June 1969. The bad news: her performance is over the top and indulgent, bordering on caricature. This Judy is a honking, bleary pastiche, from which triumphant renditions of Get Happy and Over the Rainbow emerge.
Quilter’s script, first staged at Sydney Opera House in 2005, encourages this. It’s a recurring doom loop in which Judy’s talent crashes into her addiction issues and her dependency on men, be they straight exploiters or gay worshippers. She is required to be simultaneously a grotesque, slurring drunk and a self-aware icon, capping needy pleading with witty comebacks in a seemingly endless series of dialogue setups and payoffs.
The young men she chiefly interacts with onstage – her aggressive American “manager” and fifth-husband-to-be Mickey Deans (Jacob Dudman), and her exasperatedly adoring English pianist Anthony (Adam Filipe) – are stooges rather than consistent characters, there to feed her lines (and pills, and Scotch). It’s baggily staged: I’m guessing that Rupert Hands’ direction largely consisted of eager nods and the words “whatever you want, darling”.
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There are copious knowing asides about Judy’s gay following and her history for the faithful, including obligatory references to The Wizard of Oz. There’s no progression and nothing is learned: does anyone out there not already know that the grooming and damage Garland suffered as a child star in Hollywood set the pattern for her short adult life? I’m fine with drag, cartoonish comedy and bad taste, but this is simply poor and unsubtle theatre.
The ending, like Garland’s, is painfully drawn out, pushing the running time to nearly three hours, before the inevitable rendition of the song that gives the play its title. Anthony maps out a potential future for him and Judy of sexless companionship, drizzle and toad-in-the-hole in Brighton.
As this meandered mawkishly on, I had to restrain myself from shouting “get a move on!” and briefly considered stabbing myself in the leg. Anthony’s offered vision, incidentally, would surely be as deadly for Garland as any of her marriages or the abusive professional relationships with movie and music moguls.
The setting at least is apt, the tawdry glamour of Soho Theatre Walthamshow – a huge, restored 1930s cinema – doing duty for the play’s twin locations of Garland’s suite at the Ritz and the stage of the Talk of the Town nightclub (formerly, and now again, the Hippodrome).
Set and costume designer Jasmine Swan gives us a grand piano atop a set of satin-covered steps with matching ruched curtains behind, which periodically lift to reveal the excellent five-piece band. Monsoon is clad in costumes - an encrusted pantsuit, an embroidered side-train – inspired by Garland’s wardrobe, onstage and off. Except of course, this play suggests Garland was never really allowed to be offstage.
And there is a logic to all this. Monsoon impersonated Garland during her winning run on RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2022, before storming Broadway in Chicago, Little Shop of Horrors, Pirates! The Penzance Musical and Oh, Mary! She states in a programme interview that she has her own legacy of addiction. Those who see in Garland the quintessence of the bravely suffering artist, or who just want to watch Monsoon pull faces as she delivers one-liners and belts out chandelier-shaking showtunes, will be equally pleased. The audience on opening night loved it.
But Garland has now been dead for 57 years, ten years longer than she actually lived, and there’s something unseemly in seeing her tragic corpse dragged yet again round a stage for prurient delectation. She fulfils the same role for an LGBTQ+ audience as Marilyn Monroe does for straights: a “suffering servant” on whom our guilt, desire and pity can be loaded. This show gives its audience what they want: but what they want, apparently, is necrophilia. Can’t we let the poor woman rest?
To 21 June, sohotheatre.com
