End of the Rainbow
Opening Night: April 2, 2012
Closing: August 19, 2012
Theater: Belasco Theatre
Starring Olivier® Award-winner Tracie Bennett in a bravura performance as Judy Garland, End of the Rainbow received rave reviews and four Olivier® Award nominations in London. The setting is December 1968, and Judy Garland is about to make her comeback… again. In a London hotel room preparing for a series of concerts, with both her new young fiancé and her adoring accompanist, Garland struggles to get "beyond the rainbow" with her signature cocktail of talent, tenacity, and razor-sharp wit. This savagely funny drama offers unique insight into the inner conflict that inspired and consumed one of the most beloved figures in American popular culture. End of the Rainbow features some of Garland’s most memorable songs, performed with the show-stopping gusto for which she will always be remembered.
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April 2, 2012
History says Judy Garland accidentally died of a drug overdose in 1969. Don’t believe it. The star of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Judgment at Nuremberg" is very much alive – though barely – in "End of the Rainbow," a British import that opened Monday at the Belasco Theatre. Tracie Bennett, the woman tasked with filling Garland’s ruby slippers, is so stunning that she manages to raise the dead.
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April 2, 2012
British actor Tracie Bennett is not too well-known on these shores. Yet when she enters at the top of Peter Quilter’s “End of the Rainbow,” she earns a round of applause. That’s because she playing an iconic figure, the titanically talented Judy Garland, toward the finish of her roller-coaster career. It’s 1968, and the famously troubled singer is about to make yet another comeback, in a series of London concerts. With her manager and soon-to-be fifth husband, Mickey Deans, and loyal accompanist Anthony, a fictional amalgam of her gay followers, in tow, Garland is broke, desperate, and addicted to booze and pills. Though the audience is applauding the legend as Bennett enters William Dudley’s stylish hotel-suite set, by the end of the evening she earns roars of approval for her own high-energy, heartbreaking performance.
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April 2, 2012
It’s extremely jarring for someone weaned on "The Wizard of Oz" to see Judy Garland – or at least an actress pretending to be Judy Garland – popping pills, guzzling vodka, making suicide threats, talking about her indulgent sex life, cursing nonstop and completely falling apart while performing one of her trademark songs.
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April 2, 2012
How good is Tracie Bennett at channeling Judy Garland near the exhausting burnout of her brief, tumultuous life? The British actress is so good that, for someone not a serious Judy devotee or somebody who gets kicks from watching train wrecks, she is really, really hard to be around.
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April 2, 2012
End of the Rainbow is a wreath for Judy Garland—not a laurel wreath for her power, but a floral one for her funeral. And its sympathy for the great singer is largely of the bad-faith tabloid kind, whose purported “concern” for celebrities is a tool to justify articles and photographs that paint them as grotesques. The Garland of Peter Quilter’s drama, directed by Terry Johnson, is accordingly the wretched one of the very final years. Here, for our terror and pity and amusement, is Garland agonistes: aging, broke, unlucky in love, ravaged by pills, losing control, totally over the whole rainbow thing and determined to drink herself under the table.
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April 2, 2012
As befits a play about Judy Garland, a woman known for liberally mixing her pills, Peter Quilter’s “End of the Rainbow” is a jolting upper and downer at the same time. After watching Tracie Bennett’s electrifying interpretation of Garland in the intense production that opened on Monday night at the Belasco Theater, you feel exhilarated and exhausted, equally ready to dance down the street and crawl under a rock.
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