[Dixielandjazz] A Re-creation of Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall Concert

[Steve Barbone]

Yes, there is an audience for re-creations, tributes and/or homages.

Judy Garland's 1961 concert was a tour de force. Those of us who saw this
concert or bought the album will most likely never forget the electricity of
Judy's performance and that of the band. Rufus Wainwright's 2 day homage at
Carnegie this week sold out, captivating an eclectic audience.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Rufus Wainwright Pays Tribute to Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall

NY TIMES - By STEPHEN HOLDEN - June 16, 2006

They came to commune with a legend and to pay their respects to the singer
channeling her. "They" would be the heavily gay, mostly male, mostly over-30
audience that sold out Carnegie Hall on Wednesday and Thursday evenings; the
legend would be Judy Garland; and the gawky, flouncing pop shaman conjuring
her would be Rufus Wainwright, the 32-year-old singer-songwriter and opera
maven descended from folk-music royalty.

It doesn'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 re-creation
of Garland's brilliant concert of April 23, 1961, which became "Judy at
Carnegie Hall," the most beloved of all prerock concert albums, was a
fabulous stunt. Not even Madonna, pop music's ultimate provocateur, has
attempted anything so ambitious.

What unfolded onstage Wednesday was a tour de force of politically
empowering performance art in which a proudly gay male performer paid homage
to the original and most durable gay icon in the crowded pantheon of pop
divas. Accompanying him was a 36-piece orchestra conducted by Stephen Oremus
playing the original 1961 arrangements, transposed several notes lower to
suit Mr. Wainwright's voice.

The concert was a two-family affair, with Garland's clan represented by her
daughter Lorna Luft, who arrived onstage late in the two-and-a-half-hour
marathon to put her seal of approval on the project by joining Mr.
Wainwright in a duet of "After You've Gone." (Garland's other daughter, Liza
Minnelli, was conspicuously absent.)

Besides Rufus, the Wainwrights were represented by his sister, Martha, who
brought down the house with a whooping and swooping "Stormy Weather"; and by
his mother, Kate McGarrigle, who accompanied him on piano on "Over the
Rainbow" and an encore of "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" that is not on the
Garland album. 

Because Garland's stamina onstage was legendary, Mr. Wainwright's biggest
challenge was to build and sustain the kind of electrical connection between
performer and audience that, in Garland's case, approached a vampirish
emotional symbiosis. In contrast to the go-for-broke emotional immediacy
Garland churned up like a great actress, Mr. Wainwright is an arch bohemian
dandy who is far too self-conscious to give himself heart and soul to
standards he obviously admires, but finds technically daunting, and in many
cases doesn't know that well.

But there are also deep similarities. Like Garland, Mr. Wainwright is a
natural clown and showman who deftly turned his many little flubs into
endearing comic bits of business. Like Garland, he is a witty storyteller
with a keen sense of the absurd who is not afraid to make fun of himself. In
one of many amusing anecdotes on Wednesday, he remembered his childhood
identification with "The Wizard of Oz." On good days, he said, he imagined
he was Dorothy, and on bad ones the Wicked Witch of the West.

Scattered through a concert, some of whose two-dozen-plus songs he hadn't
fully memorized, were some memorable performances. Mr. Wainwright rode the
famous bongo-propelled arrangement of "Come Rain or Come Shine" to glory.
His tender, reflective "Over the Rainbow" evoked the vocal sound of Harry
Nilsson's nearly forgotten 1973 album, "A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the
Night," one of the first records in which a rock singer broke ranks to gaze
wistfully into the past. An eerie falsetto version of "Do It Again," in
Garland's key, almost worked, except for some tonal slips. "The Trolley
Song" elicited cheers. He also talked about the album that inspired the
concert, citing "If Love Were All" as his favorite song in the set.

For those who came to worship, Mr. Wainwright could do no wrong. If there
were no boos, an audience clearly primed to go crazy never exploded into
cathartic pandemonium. Still, Mr. Wainwright's courage to stand as a
surrogate for every Garland fan who ever gazed into the mirror and
fantasized about stepping into her ruby slippers spoke for itself. Simply
for doing it, he was a hero.