Channelling Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, by Rufus Wainwright...
While I am still at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in Australia, it seems that I’ve managed to miss the year’s greatest cabaret event of the year, and quite possibly millennium so far, at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where Rufus Wainwright has this week done an astonishing thing: he has recreated Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert there in its entirety. According to Stephen Holden in his New York Times review, “It didn’t matter that Mr. Wainwright sounds nothing like Garland or that his voice, an astringent drone with a quavering edge, uncertain intonation and slightly garbled diction, isn’t half as good an instrument as Garland’s. The spirit was there. At the very least, his loving song-by-song recreation of “Judy at Carnegie Hall,” Garland’s brilliant 1961 concert that became the most beloved of all pre-rock concert albums, was a fabulous stunt. Not even Madonna, pop music’s ultimate pop provocateur, has attempted anything so ambitious. What unfolded onstage was a tour de force of politically empowering performance art in which a proudly gay male performer paid homage to the original and longest-running gay icon in the crowded pantheon of pop divas.”
What a hip and amazing idea! And it is one that, as Holden suggests, was something that “the heavily gay, male, over-30 audience” could intimately identify with: “His courage to stand as a surrogate for every audience member who ever gazed into the mirror and fantasized slipping into Dorothy’s ruby slippers spoke for itself.”
At last year’s Edinburgh Fringe (and subsequently off-Broadway), there was a similar act of powerful appropriation, when New York performance artist Bradford Louryk recreated an interview with Christine Jorgensen, a celebrated male-to-female sex change, that brought Jorgensen back to intimate life. But that was mimed to Jorgensen’s own voice; Wainwright’s show, by contrast, is a far more personalised tribute. Perhaps he can be joined by one of his sisters to recreate the legendary Judy and Liza concert at the London Palladium one day…
