Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 27 Sep @ 19.30
Are there still any gay men under the age of, say, 106 for whom Judy Garland is still an icon? For wizened old Francis (Donald McBride) it goes further. He’s Judy reincarnated and knows her every move: the pills that kept her thin; her 1942 abortion; her impassioned stage performances at the end of her life. When she sang that she ‘won’t let sorrow hurt me’ nobody believed her. She overdosed in 1969.
Francis channels Judy for all he’s worth trying to make sense of his own troubled gay feelings growing up. Francis swears to be everything Judy was not, forsaking drink and pills (even medicine when he is ill). Like Judy he searched for the right man to love, only to find tragedy. In Francis’s case it’s AIDS.
The 1980s AIDS crisis is a story still worth exploring but it’s thrown away here as an added extra; the disease and Judy’s demise could have dramatically dovetailed better. McBride performs in plain red shoes (what happened to the glittery Ruby Slippers?) and underpants and there is a palpable sense of relief when he finally puts his trousers on. The action is counterpointed by a huge screen with shaky footage of Judy’s ‘Amphetamine Annie’ years. Her fantastic timing and tremulous delivery is a masterclass in dramatic performance and often shows up the live action in all its over-fussy tediousness. As Judy tap dances with chorus boys, Francis accompanies her (badly) on the spoons. Sadly it feels like what a young playwright thinks goes on inside an old queen’s head and too often misses the mark.
Writer Lee Mattinson packs lots into the story but anyone not knowing Garland’s tragic biography may get confused (‘gay poppa’ is a reference to Judy’s husband, film director Vincente Minnelli). Director Jen Malarkey makes what she can of all this. But we get an awful lot of stacking and unstacking of chairs when we wanted the tears and laughter that so sugarplum’d Garland’s sell-out London Palladium shows. The evening is saved by Donald McBride’s mesmerising performance in a pretty thankless role.