Lucy Penrose, Belinda Wollaston and Helen Sheals in Through the Mill at the London Theatre Workshop. Picture: Darren Bell
Through the Mill continues at London Theatre Workshop, Fulham until 19 December.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Three different actresses play showbiz legend Judy Garland at three stages of her turbulent, drink-and-drug-fuelled, suicide-inclined career in Ray Rackham’s new play which has its world premiere this month at the bijou pub theatre he founded on the New King’s Road.
Complex, clever and educational, even to those oldies like me who were brought up on Garland, it is a fine follow-up to the excellent debut musical Apartment 40C he wrote with fellow director Tom Lees that made a fleeting reappearance at St James Theatre in April after its LTW run last December and is whispered to be heading to New York.
Through the Mill features ten songs forever associated with that unique voice, from the pre-Wizard of Oz years when she was discovered at 12 and made into a marquee MGM name through her needy adult years of the 1950s up to her trials and tribulations as a not-very-comfortable TV show host in the early 1960s.
There’s the inevitable ‘Over the Rainbow’ but before then such beauties as ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart’, ‘You Made Me Love You’, ‘Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody’ and ‘The Trolley Song’, all delivered with punch and pathos by three different voices, all good but never, of course, Garland-good.
The story takes its leave in 1963, long before the grim end in London in 1969, when, a parody of her once-great self and worn out by life and barbiturates, she was found dead by her fifth husband on the floor of their Chelsea flat at just 47.
The original comeback queen whose tremendous highs were inevitably followed by devastating lows, Garland was undoubtedly a pain to work with or be married to, but audiences never stopped reciprocating the love she poured over them in performances that took so much out of her fragile frame.
Her many moods give the actress-singers playing her, Lucy Penrose as the Young Judy, Belinda Wollaston as Palace Judy and Helen Sheals as CBS Judy, tremendous scope to shine and all three, often onstage at the same time in dramatic tableaux, accept the challenge with alacrity.
Penrose, fresh out of Mountview Academy, is a real find, a luminous young lady who can act with her eyes and sing with lovely, unforced simplicity. We should be hearing a lot more about her.
Wollaston is the one with the big voice, commanding the stage as she invests ‘Get Happy’ with a terrific belt, while Sheals captures the slurring and jerky gestures of the fading Garland with compelling impact, although the fact that she’s a head shorter than Wollaston takes a little getting used to!
The rest of cast, apart from Harry Anton as Judy’s longest-lasting husband Sid Luft (eerie that their daughter Lorna is singing at the Crazy Coqs this very week) and Amanda Bailey as Judy’s pushy mother Ethel, have to multi-task as actor-musicians.
Full marks for versatility to Tom Elliot Reade, fresh from his Landor debut in Romance, Romance, Carmella Brown as Judy’s dresser, veteran Don Cotter as LB Mayer, Joe Shefer, as Judy’s father with a penchant for little boys, Rob Carter, Perry Meadowcroft, Chris McGuigan and Chris Weaver.
Director Max Reynolds makes a great job of fitting everyone into the small space and keeping the action ripping along, although Act II occasionally gets a tad wordy and static. There is plenty of time to smooth rough edges and this is an intriguing, entertaining, intelligently-written show that will stand seeing again before the end of its three-week run.
Oh yes, and the superbly informative programme is the best I’ve ever seen at a Fringe theatre.
Jeremy Chapman
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.