Dvd/150: LIFE WITH JUDY GARLAND: ME AND MY SHADOWS (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2001)

This tv movie biopic of Judy Garland, based on the memoir of her daughter Lorna Luft, is an oddly muted affair, not so much access-all-areas as a sad-eyed guided tour.

Both actresses - Tammy Blanchard as Young Judy, Judy Davis as Star Judy - start off oddly.  Initially Blanchard looks more like a young Midler than Garland but in the recreations of her film roles she is uncanny.

Davis looks odd in her first set piece, "The Trolley Song" from MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS but once she settles into the troubled Judy of the late 1940s onwards, she looks more like the real thing.

Exploring Garland's rollercoaster life, one wishes for more insight at times.  With understated support from Marsha Mason, Hugh Laurie, John Benjamin Hickey and Victor Garber - an obviously uncritical portrayal of Sid Luft, Lorna's father - it's the blazing and commited performance of Davis one remembers.

Shelf or charity shop?  I think it has to be charity shop...

 

Oh ker-fuck.  I know where I want to be on Monday January 12th. And it ain't here.

For one night only Natasha Richardson, Victor Garber, Christine Baranski, Laura Benanti and Vanessa Redgrave will appear in a fundraising concert version of Stephen Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. Vanessa sings Sondheim!

The ticket prices would bring on a new credit crunch - the cheapest at the back of the mezzanine being $150.

NIGHT MUSIC is being staged at the end of the year at the Menier Chocolate Factory and I have tickets for December. Only instead of Vanessa Redgrave they have Maureen Lipman.  To quote one of the songs "Every Day A Little Death".