FEBRUARY 9TH—GARDEN GROVE
END OF THE RAINBOW is about a star who was born, sparkled, and fell.
As befits a play about Judy Garland, a woman known for liberally mixing her pills, Peter Quilter’s full-throttle END OF THE RAINBOW is a jolting upper and downer at the same time. After watching Nicole Cassesso’s electrifying interpretation of Garland in the intense production that opened last Friday night at the GEM Theatre, you feel exhilarated and exhausted, equally ready to dance down the street and crawl under a rock.
In other words, you feel utterly alive, with all the contradictions that implies. That’s what comes from witnessing acting that is this unconditionally committed, not to mention this sensational — in every sense of the word. One More Production’s limited engagement of Quilter’s master stroke is shot through with witty gallows humor and compassion for a wounded soul. Most of all, it has a marvel-inducing tour-de-force by Ms. Cassesso under Damien Lorton’s direction.
Set in 1968 in a London hotel suite and a nightclub, where a shaky Garland has arrived for yet another of her fabled comebacks, the author's unsparing script is in some ways your standard-issue showbiz pathography, a lurid account of the twilight of an all-too-mortal goddess on the eve of destruction. Yet while it includes details that would have been greedily consumed by the paparazzi, END OF THE RAINBOW is revealing in a way that a tell-all bio-drama seldom is.
For us, it comes as a musical drama solely about the last few months of Judy Garland at the age of 47, arguably old Hollywood’s most impressive performer. Like Garland, Broadway World-nominated Nicole Cassesso is also a triple threat, matching Garland’s late-career vocal stylings tremolo for tremolo, locating that perilous, bipolar energy that so often animates great performers. Touch this woman at your own risk. She burns.
Certainly the other characters in ...RAINBOW feel that heat. Chief among them are Mickey Deans (a perfectly cast Peter Crisafulli), Garland’s manager and much younger husband-to-be (her fifth), and Anthony (a wonderful Trevin Stephenson), her pianist on this trip. Jon Michell plays an assortment of other roles: Radio Interviewer/porter/ASM. To these men falls the assignment of keeping Garland sober and making sure she shows up for her performances at the club, the Talk of the Town.
The ultimately insuperable task of fulfilling those duties shapes the plot of …RAINBOW as it shifts between Garland’s Ritz Hotel suite and the stage where she sings with varying confidence and control. Right now Garland seems primed to take on the world even though her health is failing, her discipline is non-existent and her finances are in a desperate state. But she still has that talent, that skill and that shark-like drive. The big questions: Just how long can these guys keep Judy away from the pills and liquor? Or from breaking down and disgracing herself in public?
Their stratagems differ in ways suitable to their roles as the archetypal men in Garland’s life — both exasperated men who don’t quite know how to love her. There's Mickey, an ambitious up-and-comer from New York, who is the latest (and last) in a succession of exploitative mates. And Anthony, a transplanted Scot who stands in for all the gay fans who worshipped and identified with Garland, and thinks he knows exactly how to love her. But it is, at best, a Sunday kind of love he offers, a proposition that Mr. Stephenson embodies most touchingly.
“What is it with you people?” Mickey angrily asks Anthony. “The more she falls apart, the more you adore her.”
The play includes the requisite expository references to Garland’s monstrous stage mother, her previous husbands, her famous friends, her pharmaceutically sustained servitude to MGM and her legendary movie roles in “The Wizard of Oz,” Meet Me in St. Louis,” and “A Star is Born.”
On the other hand, this is Judy Garland. The girl who was born in a trunk and never really left it. She was primed to be ON, in capital letters, from earliest childhood and was force-fed pills to turn her on — and off — as if her prodigious talent were an everyday lighting fixture.
Ms. Cassesso seems to keep every chapter of that history and the disjunctive reality it created alive in her performance. Foul-mouthed, flirtatious, hypersexual, childlike, unedited, manipulative and supremely self-conscious — Ms. Cassesso’s Garland is all these things as she makes love and war with Mickey and Anthony. She is, in other words, a raging mess who can’t help how she behaves and knows it.
And then...she sings. And all those disparate, desperate elements coalesce into a coherent, riveting whole. In numbers that include a gorgeously introspective “Man That Got Away” and a terrifyingly manic, Ritalin-fueled “Come Rain or Come Shine,” you hear not only the music but also where it comes from. Empathy trumps exhibitionism.
When Deans walks out on her at the end of the first act, leaving Ms. Cassesso’s Judy to crumble, she sings an emotion-choked “The Man That Got Away.”
“My God, Mickey,” Judy says to her husband at the end of the first act, “you gotta see the whole picture. It’s not this or that. Everything just comes at me at once, and it crashes from one thing to the other. I can’t control it — why can’t you see that?”
She has Garland’s unusual timber and her strange sound on vowels. She has all the iconic stances and moves, especially the rooster like image of Garland in silhouette, legs planted far apart, her spinal column arched almost horizontally like a dancer in a dip, the left arm straining towards the floor and her right hand aloft bent at the elbow holding the microphone downwards to her mouth – creating an almost impossible diagonal. Yes, I would say this portrayal is about as close as you can get.
This Judy is quick-witted, randy, sparkling, profane, good-humored in a fatalistic way, not just charming but long accustomed to using that charm to get what she wants. She tosses off witticisms like, “Whenever I drink water, I always feel I’m missing something.”
But that’s very short-lived. As the run-up to her opening night approaches, she begins to become more desperate for Ritalin or liquor or anything. Fueled with desperation, she masterfully invokes well-practiced ploys to manipulate anyone who loves her. She harasses Deans for booze and pills just to be able get through the first few performances. Temporarily rebuffed, she tells Deans and her adoring accompanist Anthony, “I’ve been stepping around guys like you for years.”
Once Deans relents, she falls apart, a deterioration charted through scenes at her concerts in which she can’t focus on which song she is performing and even struggles with the microphone cord. Even when she nails the concert, she’s all the more used up. She’s told, “You tore the roof off,” to which she responds, “I have nothing left to give.”
All of this is observed by Mr. Stephenson’s Anthony, who is contemptuous of Deans’ protestations and only wants to protect her. Both men revere her and both are rancorously jealous of the other. The manager accuses the pianist of being one of those gay devotees who enabled Garland’s self-immolation by celebrating, encouraging and wallowing in her pain. The pianist accuses the manager of being one of those users who will not stick around for the long run.
Although her descent is written episodically, Peter Quilter makes the downward arc quite plausible, perhaps because early on he plants subtle clues to her instability that he knows we will pick up on. That clearly plotted deterioration is all the more dampening because he effectively depicts Garland at the top of the play as a vital, intelligent, charismatic creature.
By the time, Ms. Cassesso’s Judy Garland closes Quilter’s play with guess what song, she is a quivering mass of failure yearning for a peaceful past that she knows never existed.
ONE MORE PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS, END OF THE RAINBOW, Directed and Musically Directed by Damien Lorton. Written by Peter Quilter. In addition to Director Lorton as Chief Artistic Director and Ms. Cassesso as Chief Executive Director, One More Productions boasts Dan Baird as Chief Operating Officer, Victor Ealey as Box Office Manager, the fabulous Jeff Segal as Musician Lead and Kara Dillard in the Box Offce.
Starring Nicole Cassesso as Judy Garland; Peter Crisafulli as Mickey Deans, Trevin Stephenson as Anthony, Jon Michell as Radio Interviewer.
Performances are February 7th through February 23rd, Fridays & Saturdays at 8PM & Sundays at 2PM at GEM Theatre, 12852 Main St, Garden Grove, CA. Opening Night and pre-show Gala of End of the Rainbow is February 8th. $35-$50. Running time just under two hours including intermission. For Tickets: (714) 741-9550 or www.onemoreproductions.com
Chris Daniels
Arts & Entertainment Reviewer
The Show Report
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