Tracie Bennett, two-time Whatsonstage.com Award winner, will star as Judy Garland in Peter Quilter’s “play with music” End of the Rainbow, which runs at the Theatre Royal Northampton from 5 to 20 February 2010.
It’s December 1968 and Judy Garland is about to make her comeback… again. In a London hotel room with her young new fiancé at her side, Garland battles with a tornado of drugs and alcohol as she undertakes an exhausting series of concerts at the Talk of the Town to try and reclaim her crown as the greatest talent of her generation. Despite a series of failed marriages and a wrecked Hollywood career, Judy remains a tough, compelling, remarkable woman always armed to the teeth with her legendary razor sharp wit.
Garland died in London following an accidental drug overdose on 22 June 1969, at age 47. Quilter’s musical drama about her final months includes several of her best-known songs, including “Get Happy”, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, “The Trolley Song”, “The Man That Got Away”, and from The Wizard of Oz, ”Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
End of the Rainbow premiered in July 2005 at the Sydney Opera House and proved a sell-out hit there and in Melbourne, with another Whatsonstage.com Award winner, Australian Caroline O’Connor, who reprised her performance for the show’s UK premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2006.
Tracie Bennett is not a stranger to the role. She appeared in an earlier incarnation of the play at London’s New End Theatre in 2001, when it ran under the title of The Last Song of the Nightingale and the American diva was unnamed through a thinly disguised version of Garland.
More recently, Bennett has been busy in the West End, winning Whatsonstage.com Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a musical for first Hairspray and then La Cage aux Folles. The latter was directed by Terry Johnson, who will also direct End of the Rainbow.
