Writer: Peter Quilter
Director: Rupert Hands
Peter Quilter’s play about the final months of Judy Garland’s life arrives at Soho Theatre Walthamstow with Jinkx Monsoon in the title role, and the question hanging over the whole enterprise is a reasonable one: can a performer perhaps best known in the UK for her two victories on RuPaul’s Drag Race carry a piece this demanding? Monsoon, of course, is considerably more than that:.And in any case, the question is answered within minutes.
End of the Rainbow moves between Garland’s hotel suite and re-enactments of her celebrated run at the Talk of the Town, tracing a period in which her talent remained undimmed, and her grip on everything else was loosening fast. She is flanked throughout by her young fiancé Mickey Deans (Jacob Dudman) and her pianist and confidant Anthony (Adam Filipe), two men who love her in entirely different ways and are helpless in entirely different ways too. Quilter’s script is, for the most part, wonderfully funny, and Monsoon tears into the comedy with the kind of impeccable timing that reminds you she is, whatever else she might be, a consummate performer. The laughs come thick and fast, and she earns every one of them.
Jasmine Swan’s set is a delight: a tiered confection in brilliant white, like an enormous wedding cake, with only a jet-black piano and telephone punctuating the blankness. It is at once glamorous and faintly sterile, which seems entirely right for a woman living out of hotel rooms and slowly coming apart. The venue itself does considerable work too. Soho Theatre Walthamstow is a stunningly beautiful space, lovingly restored to its former art deco glory, and it lends the whole evening a sense of grandeur that feels entirely appropriate. Seeing Monsoon perform in this room gives you a genuine feel for the world Garland inhabited: the chandeliers, the expectation, the gilded trap of it all.
Dudman and Filipe are both solid foils, and Rupert Hands’s direction keeps everything moving with purpose. But this is Monsoon’s show, and nobody in the room is in any doubt about that. Where she genuinely astonishes is in the concert sequences as the run nears its end, as Judy performs under the influence of pills and alcohol. The slurring, the missed cues, the notes landing slightly off their mark: it is performed with such control that you are watching a performance of a failing performance, and the tension it generates is extraordinary. A career on the verge of becoming a trainwreck, rendered without a flicker of condescension. It is the best thing in the evening by some distance.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the production never fully commits to the darkness it keeps gesturing towards. The comedy lands, the singing soars, and yet something holds the audience at bay from Garland’s despair. You sympathise rather than feel it yourself. Hands pulls back at the moments when the production ought to lean in hardest, and the result is a show you admire considerably more than it moves you.
There are longueurs too. The show runs to just shy of three hours, including the interval, against an expected running time of two and a half, and those extra 30 minutes are felt. A judicious edit would have sharpened the emotional impact considerably.
The ending also misjudges things. An audio clip of the real Garland, dropped in just before the curtain, is the kind of choice that sounds meaningful in the rehearsal room but lands awkwardly on the night: Monsoon has done too much for us to need the reminder. And when Filipe steps forward to deliver a series of solemn postscripts about what became of everyone, listing the famous names who attended Garland’s New York funeral as though that somehow tallied up the worth of a life, the production stumbles into something unnecessarily portentous. It is the one moment where the show loses sight of what it has spent the previous three hours doing so well.
These are real complaints, but they sit against the backdrop of a production that is, in most respects, exceptional. Monsoon delivers a performance of remarkable range and precision, but End of the Rainbow keeps Garland’s tragedy at a remove when it ought to be hauling you towards it, and an overlong running time and misjudged ending cost it the final star. A towering central performance in a production that is very good but, with a little more courage, could have been devastating.
Runs until 21 June 2026
