‘A rounded portrait of a woman on the verge of dissolution’
Transformation is arguably the keystone of drag. Yet the genre is often accused of lacking subtlety, tending towards mockery and salaciousness. That is, until now.
Vests and muscles ripple; serumed and plumped faces turn this way and that; the place reeks of Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. A sea of the who’s who of gay society tussles into the 1930s utter splendour of Soho Theatre Walthamstow. Having celebrated a year there, it’s a travesty I haven’t visited yet. Formerly the Granada Cinema, it drips with Moorish details, Art Deco geometrics and cup holders – a gay man’s/alcoholic’s heaven. Add two-time Drag Race winner and Broadway star Jinkx Monsoon playing queer aristocracy original Judy Garland and you get queer nirvana.
Peter Quilter’s script formed the basis for Renée Zellweger’s 2020 Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe-winning performance in Judy, but having a trans actress play the icon seems an even sharper move. Rupert Hands crafts a world of performative luxury: all fur coat and no knickers. We have it split between her Ritz dressing room and the London Hippodrome, where she performed her final residency in 1969, shortly before her death from a drug overdose, just 12 days after her 47th birthday. Jasmine Swan places a piano centre stage (as it should be); layers of white ruffled steps, like a tiered cake – perhaps referencing Garland’s upcoming nuptials – rise upwards; then, behind a curtain revealed when she takes to the stage at Talk of the Town: BAM! A full band and the flashing bulbs of show-business. The costumes do well to shrink Monsoon, ageing and frailing beneath oversized sequins and feathers, while one reveal harkens back to her Drag Race beginnings.
A better resurrection of Judy Garland you’d be hard-pressed to find without a necromancer and a dead chicken. Monsoon has clearly worked diligently with Nick Barstow to achieve and replicate Garland’s distinctive, explosive, sometimes slurred, heavily theatrical and uniquely demanding vocal footprint. No easy task. Monsoon treads the tightrope between caricature and understatement, balancing somewhere close to realism. The menfolk – Jacob Dudman as the drug-dealing fiancé Mickey Deans and Adam Filipe as the adoring queer pianist – feel muted next to Monsoon’s buzzed performance. At points, it feels almost like a one-woman show as she belts out “Come Rain or Come Shine”, “Just in Time”, and a slightly rushed “Over the Rainbow” in the finale. With a gargantuan first act and a rather brisk second, it’s undeniably top-heavy, but finishing on her final performance – poppy dress and all – leaves a lingering emotional weight.
The cajoling, manipulative, manipulated, yet resilient Garland has often been impersonated to varying degrees of effectiveness and kindness. Monsoon’s own experience with addiction lends this portrayal sympathy and nuance, presenting a rounded portrait of a woman on the verge of dissolution. My issue, however, is that discussions of Garland so often leap from her at 17 in The Wizard of Oz to the final months of her life in the late 1960s. What about the achievements in between: the 34 films, the Grammy Award-winning album? Despite mentions of “shining a light” in the ephemera, the merchandise page sits rather pointedly opposite the section detailing Judy’s relationship with gay men. It’s this complicity within the queer community that makes me uncomfortable. To what degree were we – and are we – implicated in her destruction and subsequent queer martyrdom? A question only history, or the current reigning supreme (Cher) can answer.
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