Phoenix Theatre's END OF THE RAINBOW - a conversation with star Jeannie Shubitz and director Karla Koskinen

by Gil Benbrook

While Judy Garland will forever be remembered as young Dorothy Gale in the iconic film The Wizard of Oz, she also unfortunately is almost as well known for her short and tragic life, dying at age 47 of a drug overdose. Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow is a celebration of the life and the music of this legend. Set a few short months before Garland’s death in 1969, the play features some of Judy’s most famous songs but also exposes the excesses that led to her early demise. Phoenix Theatre is presenting the Arizona premiere of the play through May 17th starring Jeannie Shubitz as Garland.

End of the Rainbow takes place in London in Judy’s suite at the Ritz Hotel.  She is preparing for her six-week long engagement of concerts at The Talk of the Town, with her much younger fiancé Mickey Deans in tow and her trusty friend and pianist Anthony at her side.  The play shows Garland as she struggles with her drug and alcohol addictions and deals with the constant demands from her fans and the overeager press. She also worries about her money problems as the strained relationships she has with these two men start to take a toll on her ability to perform. While End of the Rainbow is a fictional account of the details of those events, it is ultimately an interesting study in how a person becomes the victim of their fame.  Judy feels trapped in her hotel room, overwhelmed with having to perform every night at her Talk of the Town concerts.  So, she lashes out at the two men closest to her at that time in her life, even though they are both trying to help her.

But what elevates End of the Rainbow beyond a drama that focuses only on a celebrity’s inner turmoil is the music the play features. While most of the drama is set in the hotel suite, there are several times when the hotel suite setting opens up to transport us to one of Judy’s Talk of the Town concerts. Some of Garland’s biggest hits are sung by Shubitz in those sequences.  These musical interludes allow us to see the joy that Garland brought to audiences, even while she was wrestling with her own demons, with her performances of such tunes as "The Man that Got Away," "Come Rain or Come Shine" and her signature song "Over the Rainbow."

While the songs help break up the amount of drama in the play, there is also plenty of humor as well and, in reality, Garland had a wicked sense of humor. In one scene Garland is reminded that Deans will actually be her fifth husband, and not her fourth as she keeps stating. Garland replies with "Who'd I miss? Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy..." The play also includes some bittersweet moments with Judy talking about the long days she had at MGM as a child actor and the pills she was given to pep her up and others to slow her down. Many of the child actors of that period, like Mickey Rooney, also encountered problems like Garland did as adults, and Judy carefully states, "We all turned out very peculiar."

Though her much younger fiancé Deans is often perceived as using Judy as a meal ticket, the play paints him at first as someone who truly wants to help her.  He even tries to get her sober, stating firmly to her, "No booze, no pills. Nothing!" But Garland’s demons get the best of her and, in an act of desperation, Deans quickly becomes the enabler, giving her drugs and booze to entice her back onstage.  The fog of addiction descends, yet Garland somehow soldiers on.

Shubitz states that while the play portrays Judy at the end of her life, struggling to hold onto love amidst a lifetime of failed marriages and drug and alcohol addiction, Garland is also “trying to reconcile her need for public adoration, and her unpaid debt, with exhaustion and her desire for a simpler and more private life.  What's beautiful about Quilter's play is that he captures the humor, wit and joy with which she armed herself against these struggles.” But it is the connection that Garland had with her audiences that Shubitz believes was her greatest strength and also her unfortunate weakness. “Her warmth and honesty as a performer made everyone who watched her think of her as ‘theirs,’ and this very thing that elevated her to iconic status was at the root of her ultimate breakdown.”

Since Judy is so well known, with a distinctive singing voice and speaking voice, Shubitz has found that preparing for the part has proven to be a bit difficult.  “From the beginning, I have felt that trying to impersonate her would be setting myself up for failure.  You know how it is when you're trying to see a specific star in the night sky, yet when you gaze directly at it, it somehow eludes you?  I think of Judy like that.  If I aim exactly at her, I'll never get there.  I’ve tried to gather as much of her as I can from outside sources and the script, and hopefully in the end we’ve captured her light, as well as her darkness.”

Shubitz has fond memories of Garland, though she says they were originally limited to “the wide-eyed girl with the warm-honey voice from The Wizard of Oz” and some of her other famous musicals like Easter Parade from her MGM days.  Shubitz adds that the older Garland isn’t someone she was that familiar with until a few months ago when she began her research for the role.  “For anyone who's looking to cling to the image of Ms. Garland as the wide-eyed girl from Kansas, they will be...challenged... by this play.”

Director Karla Koskinen also remembers seeing Judy on TV.  She’d often watch The Judy Garland Show with her mother. “I have very vivid memories of my mother actually tearing up when she could see that Judy was unable to perform at the level she was capable of. I think because Judy’s problems with addiction were so public most people realized there was another, darker side to her life.” She adds that End of the Rainbow is a celebration of Garland that all fans will appreciate.  “The play allows us to see her amazing life force, her wry sense of humor that is at times, outrageous, and to see her in concert in very good voice. But the play also shows us Judy near the end of her life. She is scared, tired and lonely, and her addictions are getting the best of her. It’s a human story of how difficult it is to live up to being a ‘legend’ when you both crave the audiences that love you and desperately want to leave it all behind. This struggle is at the heart of the story.”

Koskinen says “the play is about a real woman with an incredible talent that was damaged by the studios and other ‘well-meaning’ people who didn’t know how dangerous the pressure and the drugs really were. It exposes both her amazing strength and her incredible vulnerability.” Koskinen also thinks, in a small way, that the play has a certain appeal to the part of us that secretly likes to see “train wrecks,” especially since there has always been a fascination with Judy Garland’s “tragic” life.  “She denied her life was a tragedy and her two daughters also spoke of how untrue that was. Although their mother struggled with addiction, they both describe their childhoods as filled with happiness as well. Perhaps the audience will think of how we like to compartmentalize stars’ lives based on their public personas. We tend to forget they are real human beings with complex motivations and lives that we know little about.”

Koskinen and Shubitz worked together before, on Phoenix Theatre's Light in the Piazza. Koskinen says that when she was asked to direct Rainbow, Shubitz was the first person she thought of to play Judy. "Not only does Jeannie possess an incredible vocal instrument but like Garland, she is very petite. Many people don’t realize Judy Garland was only 4’11 and at the end of her life she was very thin. But even more importantly Jeannie has a keen intellect that is so necessary for doing justice to Judy. Many people speak of how sharp she was. Her quick wit was a result of her lively mind and Jeannie has these same qualities. Another feature I was attracted to in Jeannie is her sensitivity. She is willing to take risks and push herself as an actress.  She will certainly need to do that in this play to bring Judy fully to life."

The process of becoming Judy Garland has been a true discovery for Shubitz.  She didn't know Garland’s work that well but when she began her research for the role she says that she finally got it. “I saw why everyone was positively in love with this woman. She was warm, loving and somehow intimately familiar with everyone.  She used humor to put people at ease.  She never took herself too seriously, and her humor was self-deprecating as often as not. She was a series of paradoxes: simultaneously a mother and a little girl, she was an entertainer in the truest sense of the word and down to the very roots of herself, yet she longed for a simpler more private and quiet life.  She was a force of nature, a dynamo, packed into a tiny 4-foot-11 frame.” Shibbitz adds, “Hopefully we will be able to capture and communicate that essence of her that inspired the love of generations of fans, while also offering a glimpse into the small corners of her life that people may be less familiar with, a more private Judy. I think that with Garland, as with many celebrities today, people are fascinated by the downfall, the tragedy and drama of it all.  I think this is a good reminder to all of us that there is a real human being behind the celebrity persona, a person just trying to get through their day to day.”

End of the Rainbow runs April 29 through May 17.

Photography by Erin Evangeline Photography of Jeannie Shubitz as Judy Garland, with Hair and Makeup by Terre Steed