The rumours are true: two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon has touched down in London to play icon of the silver screen – and the transatlantic gay community – Judy Garland. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen Monsoon impersonate Garland before – on Drag Race or, if you’re lucky, at one of her live cabaret shows. But this is a different thing entirely, because End of the Rainbow is a proper two-act play (by Peter Quilter). There’s zero audience interaction, but a handful of songs breaking up what is in fact the pretty depressing story of Garland’s demise.
Before we get onto the Jinkx Monsoon of it all, a bit of context on Garland herself. She is, of course, best known for playing Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. But by the time of Quilter’s play, which is set months before Garland’s early death in 1969 from an accidental drug overdose, there was scarcely any trace of the girl with pig tails and ruby red shoes left. By her mid forties, Garland was broke, in debt, and not unlike the late Amy Winehouse, attracting huge audiences to a London residency she was sometimes too drunk or high to perform.
It’s this unglamorous final chapter of her life Quilter’s play – which scooped up Olivier Award nominations when it premiered on the West End in 2010, and was adapted into the Renée Zellweger-starring film Judy – focuses on. It’s set, for the most part, backstage. Here, Judy is in the company of husband number five Mickey (Jacob Dudman) – a first-rate dickhead who both controls and enables her substance abuse – and her adoring pianist Anthony (Adam Filipe), a gentle gay man who credits Judy with saving his life. Quilter paints an intimate picture of a star who has lived off a diet of uppers and downers for so long she’s become divorced from herself and is essentially ‘playing Judy Garland’ – or trying to.
Like a fan loitering in the dressing room of their idol, director Rupert Hands’ production seems keen to stretch out every moment; it could do with serious trimming and tightening. On press night, it overran by 30 minutes, like a proper booze-soaked cabaret. Not that anyone seemed to mind, when it meant more time with Monsoon.
If its ending is a tad mawkish, it offers a moment of sombre reflection many will appreciate for what is, in its last breaths, a sorry story. This is not the Judy of A Star is Born, it’s the Judy of a star in decline. But in Jinkx Monsoon, another star rises.
