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End of the Rainbow

She’s drunk, scheming and downright hilarious.

Jinkx Monsoon’s superbly vulgar star turn as Judy Garland in the last raddled months of her life is blackly comic.

The action is set in 1968, the year of Garland’s death. Garland on the comeback trail once again: “It’s a terrible thing,” says the heroine, “to know what you’re capable of and never get there.”

Her greatest role, in an otherwise mediocre play, directed by Rupert Hands.

The camp action is mostly set on a staircase, in a suite at the Ritz, designed in flamboyant style by Jasmine Swan. What follows is a picture of the struggle and the wretched diva’s sympathetic gay pianist to get her through the season.

Judy is bookended by two men who embody her destruction and her salvation: her fifth husband Mickey (Jacob Dudman), a controlling enabler who feeds her addiction with one hand and tightens his grip with the other, and her devoted pianist Anthony (Adam Filipe), a quietly gay man who credits her with saving his life and repays the debt with unwavering tenderness. One might expect the latter to bring the best out in Garland, but the piece is too pettily contrived, and the craftsmanship is right on the surface.

Alas, this lack of storyline means it’s heavily reliant on the soundtrack, showbusiness, and star quality and indeed is so consumed by the lack of those ingredients in the wider cast that the show often loses grip of its own continuity.

But it does bring me on to the quality of the acting, which varies wildly in End of the Rainbow.

For, on the one hand, you’ve got luminously loony Monsoon, who is really good.

While on the other you have blandly dull Dudman and Filipe, who spend the duration struggling to suppress their frustrations with nightmare Garland. It’s is hard to tell, because their vacant stares are so prolonged and unnerving.

Have you ever lived with an alcoholic? It is hell on earth.

This bittersweet 2005 play sugarcoats that sadness. Tweaked out after decades of drug addiction and alcoholism, broke and haunted by past trauma, she is forced to go to London for five weeks of performances at the London Palladium in a bid to earn enough money to help her reunite with her two younger children.

Sensibly enough, Prema Mehta’s exquisitely styled lighting transforms the Soho Walthamstow Theatre auditorium in an instant — hotel room one moment, cabaret stage the next, flooded with colour and heat.

Anyway. Monsoon shares the scatterbrained cultural icon’s vibrato, in capital letters, and she’s a keen mimic. And overall, Hands directs this three-hander with a bang; Nick Barstow’s big-band arrangements make it impossible to look away.

Monsoon has talked at great lengths about sobriety. (In the 2022 series, Monsoon won Drag Race’s “Snatch Game” round with impersonations of Garland) That’s probably why the actor, who has herself been sober from alcohol for around seven years, suits the part so well. And may also explain why she is the glue that holds the whole thing together.

I was bored for most of End of the Rainbow. Why? Well, it’s not even a proper drama, for starters. The whole thing seems to exist in a frame of reference that rules out authentic feeling. Whether this mixed-up production and its star were offering homage, pastiche, or tribute to Garland, I left none the wiser. That is a problem.

“I gave them everything,” she says wearily of her audience. “There’s nothing left.”

It’s more exhausting than entertaining.