- London Palladium -

Judy Puts Us to Work
By Robert Ottaway - Daily Sketch

There was such a long overture to Judy Garland that I thought the TV executives, jealous of having the Palladium TV show re-imposed on their pattern of viewing, had hobbled her on the way to the theatre.  She used our nostalgia like a prop, making us work when she forgot her words, singing that she needed us - and she did.  When she tells us to be happy, we recall the sorrows and upheavals of her own life - and think if she can grin, we had better smile back.  It was an act that evoked embarrassment, loyalty, and the kind of fever you get at a football game when you are rooting for your side to win.  She riffles her hand through her hair, she comes on proudly, like a lover sure of her welcome, and we feel the pang of her own lost youth.  That, I suppose, is what makes Judy Garland a star.  Having grown up with her, she represents triumph over failure.  Even the voice, uncertainly trying to strike a note it often misses, is still potent.  The show was otherwise typical.

Judy Garland's life and temperament belong so aptly to the Hollywood of myth that you really begin to wonder if she is real.  She is like the child in the fairy tale upon whom all gifts were showered but then the forgotten and enraged fairy entered to pronounce a peculiar and horrible sentence:  Judy was condemned to act out the scripts of old musicals.  Last night she was doing the big scene from the one where the famous star was making a comeback.  The band struck up, the curtain parted to show a design of electric lights framing the word JUDY but the cue came and went without the arrival of the star.  Over the sound you could hear the audience beginning to murmur.  Just as you wondered if she'd got caught up on a nail there she was, a thin, ravaged, uncertain figure holding the mike like a lifeline.  One rather agonizing number and the applause broke like rain.  It was eerie to watch the vitality and confidence flowing back into her as though the applause were some life restoring elixir.  Corny though this particular script may be, it touched the show with more life than any other.