Judy Garland and The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium

 

The London Palladium façade

There are few venues as identified with Judy Garland during her post-MGM concert career as the London Palladium. Certainly the RKO Palace and Carnegie Hall as well, but Judy Garland’s second career began, in earnest, on 9 April 1951, at the London Palladium. So, it seems quite appropriate that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of The Wizard of Oz has taken up residence at the venue.

Judy Garland on 9 April 1951

Garland herself would stay there for four weeks in 1951, performing a 35 minute program (among a collection of other performers) twice nightly, before her (possibly more famous) run at the RKO Palace in New York City later that same year.

Judy Garland would return to London many times over the next two decades, and to the Palladium stage specifically next on 18 November 1957, and later on 1 December 1960 for The Royal Command Performance Variety Show (now the Royal Variety Performance), performing before HM Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Importantly to Judy’s later career, it was at the Palladium that Judy first performed a concert, then called, “An Evening with Judy Garland” on 28 August, and again on 4 September 1960, which was Judy’s first two-act solo concert. It was also, according to Scott Schechter’s Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Legend, “actually the first known, two-act, solo, one-woman concert by a female pop vocalist.” Far from an insignificant achievement! The set list she performed on 28 August 1960, with the exception of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which she sang in honor of the recently passed Oscar Hammerstein, would be the same she would later sing at the more famous Carnegie Hall concert on 21 April 1961.

Judy in "I Could Go On Singing" on the Palladium stage.

It is also at the London Palladium, in May 1962, that Garland filmed key sequences for what would become her final picture, I Could Go On Singing, performing the overture and introduction to “Hello, Bluebird,” and the title track, on the Palladium stage before a live audience. Two years later, on 8 and 16 November, it was there that Judy and her daughter, Liza Minnelli, for the first time, gave a joint concert, later released as Judy Garland And Liza Minnelli: “Live” At The London Palladium.

Judy Garland on "Sunday Night at The London Palladium"

Five years later, on 19 January 1969, Judy Garland would perform at the London Palladium for the final time, on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Serving as a replacement for an ailing Lena Horne, Judy’s performance that night was broadcast live on British television, and would be her last television appearance. She was dead just over five months later, not more than a few minutes from the theatre.

Judy Garland has now been gone for nearly forty two years, and yet, she is never far away. On the most recent Royal Variety Performance, on 9 December 2010, again held at the London Palladium, Michael Crawford told of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s massive undertaking in staging The Wizard of Oz for the Palladium. Crawford, known the world over for originating the titular role of The Phantom of the Opera, will be doing the same in Oz. He went on to introduce a massive group of lively school children, who sang a medley of songs from the film, before they were replaced by the singular figure of Danielle Hope dressed (in a nearly screen-accurate recreation of Garland’s costume) as Dorothy, to sing, of course, “Over the Rainbow.”

Garland herself often expressed genuine gratitude for the fame she won from The Wizard of Oz and delight at having been Dorothy.

Danielle Hope (as Dorothy)

She realized the song itself was “sacred,” concluding, “I don’t want anybody, anywhere to lose the thing they have about Dorothy and that song.”

I, for one, will be there on 1 March 2011, along with the press and the famous, on the official opening night of the musical, to see what Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, and their collaborators have wrought. But somehow, in seeing so many children singing along to the songs she helped make famous, more than seventy years ago, on the very stage were she effectively reinvented her career, I feel Judy Garland would be overjoyed to see her legacy continue right there at The London Palladium.

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