HOW DO YOU give fresh life to a biography that has been told millions of times before? If you are Amanda Bothma, Kerry Hiles and Luke Holder, and the biography in question is that of the great Judy Garland, you immerse yourself into the very fabric of that life, and open your talents to not only the narrow popular vision, but also the broader context of music and song writing that that life spawned. Garland is a name that conjures up all those old standards that are old standards because they are forever. Hers is a life story that blends the wonder and horror of a showbiz case study into 47 tragic years and a presence onstage that was unprecedented, raw and unforgettable. This is A Star is Born, which is at Theatre on the Square until 28 September 2024.
Combining the singular range of Hiles’s vocal skills with strong threads of a tale told with clear language, humour and candour, the work is impeccable. Balanced with Luke Holder’s wit at the keyboard, and the synchronicity of Holder and Hiles together, it is flawless. Here we have a show that reaches far beyond Rupert Goold’s biopic Judy in 2020, and one that celebrates the glory and humanity of popular music’s icon of the 20th century.
Garland (born Frances Gumm in 1922) was goaded into the limelight as a toddler by her mother and became addicted to the applause from the get-go. She was squeezed dry by movie-making giants of the ilk of MGM and Warner Brothers, and lived a life contorted by the ‘bolts and jolts’ of uppers and downers from her teenage years. She was signed onto the MGM stables when she was neither young enough to be a child star or old enough to be an adult. But the largeness of her talent was never downplayed. She was the kind of cash cow the film industry used for as long as she could give. And after the sudden death of her vaudevillian dad, Frank Gumm, when she was just 13, she had no one on her side.
It’s a tragic life story, peppered with marriages and divorces, catastrophes and come backs, that on stage in the telling has all the best songs whittled into its interstices. Garland was a contemporary of Mickey Rooney and Grace Kelly, of Hedy Lamar and Lana Turner. She starred opposite Fred Astaire and was the mother of Liza Minelli. Even if you weren’t born during Garland’s heyday, songs of the ilk of Irving Berlin’s A Couple of Swells and Putting on the Ritz, or Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin’s Trolley Song, will jolt your sense of recognition from the peripheries of your memory and get your heart aflutter and your feet tapping.
The beauty of many of these songs in performance is their clarity: Hiles gives articulation to every word without compromising musical nuance, which is refreshingly unusual in shows of this nature. So often the poetry and cleverness of the lyrics is lost in the force of noise. This show succeeds in balancing sound and clarity with class.
Famously, Garland once said: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of someone else,” and this dictum is developed in A Star is Born with thoughtfulness. Hiles is Hiles celebrating Garland. She’s not pretending to be her. She doesn’t don wigs or frocks to create an illusion. But her succinct reflection of a child or teenaged performer, singing her heart out against the anomalies of “being born at the age of 12 in an MGM lot” is understated, yet clear.
Like Wela Kapela’s The Story of Eva Cassidy and Vincent, the piece is constructed with internal wisdoms that allow the songs to tell the story and paint the context of Garland’s life, but it keeps the most well-known pieces, such as Harburg and Arlen’s classic, Somewhere Over the Rainbow to the very end, tying in nostalgia with a sense of completion, beautifully.
In short, this is a perfect show. A tribute to a legend, with Hiles in fabulous voice and presence, and Holder a magician at the piano, it is a must see, on every conceivable level. It’s actually a must see again, and again.
- A Star is Born: The Rise & Fall of Judy Garland is written and directed by Amanda Bothma. Performed by Kerry Hiles with Luke Holder on piano, it is produced by Wela Kapela Productions and Daphne Kuhn and stage managed by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 28 September 2024.