DEBBIE WILEMAN & BILLY STRITCH At Birdland: A GREAT BIG CLUMP OF TALENT

Last night Debbie Wileman descended upon Birdland with her new show, From London With Love, and based on the reaction it could have just as easily been called To Debbie With Love. The audience was filled with adoring and vocal fans that gave Debbie two standing ovations and demanded an encore.

The show itself was sublime and deserving of the loving response.

Billy Stritch, a great singer himself, is a piano playing gift from heaven for all other singers. His approach as an accompanist is intuitive and sympathetic, he never overpowers, yet still manages to keep his own musical identity. And when the piano and the singer have a musical conversation the result is sometimes humorous, sometimes tender, sometimes dramatic, but always magical. There are certain pianists that singers feel safe with, Mike Renzi was one, Michael Kanin is another one, and Billy Stritch is probably the best of the bunch. Whether he is playing behind, Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennett, Debbie Wileman, Marilyn Maye, or some unknown kid at Jim Caruso’s Cast Party, his instincts are always spot on and his playing is like a big comfy cushion of a safety net to whomever he is accompanying.

It’s hard for me to be objective about Debbie Wileman as a singer because I absolutely adore her as a person, but I’ll try. First off there were celebrities scattered all around the room, an Academy Award nominated actress, a popular Blogger and brooch enthusiast, a renowned Carol Channing impersonator, a celebrated producer, and a lot of other swells and glittery Manhattan types. But after the first number (Judy Garland’s Love Medley) they were all slaves to Debbie Wileman.

Wileman isn’t just a singer, she is a full fledged entertainer. She cracks jokes, dances and struts, mugs, does impersonations, and looks gorgeous while doing it. She can croon, she can be sultry and sexy, she can sound clear as a bell and then all of a sudden have a gravelly growl, and then there is the power. Her voice is a spectacular force of nature akin to Niagara Falls and the Aurora Borealis. Rarely do you hear a big sound like that coming out of a person, and when you do it’s coming from a Garland, an Aretha, a Jonas Kauffman, or a Streisand, and now the great big voice for the 21st century belongs to Debbie Wileman. And it’s not just that she can belt, it’s how she trills, bends notes, modulates, improvises, and adds new dimensions while belting that shows her genius as a performer and as a musician. Her set list was eclectic, we heard Jazz, Hollywood, Broadway, and a bit of sixties Pop. I have never heard another singer sing Sinatra’s London By Night, but Debbie Wileman did, and she made it her own. She sang low and quiet and sincerely, and you could have heard a pin drop as the audience was so transfixed by the gentleness of her sound. The love she felt for the song and her hometown were felt by all. Another highlight was Since You Left New York, one of Billy Stritch’s own compositions (with Sandy Knox) that I first fell in love with when I saw the video that Billy and Debbie made of it during the pandemic. They also did another Stritch song, the dramatic and emotional Does He Love You, which Wileman and Stritch performed for laughs, and got them! The show closed with an all out, take no prisoners, rendition of I Could Go On Singing that had the audience jumping to their feet and screaming like teenage girls at a Benson Boone concert. And then Wileman came back and topped herself by singing New York, New York as an encore, accompanied by the man who probably accompanied Liza Minnelli on that song at least 500 times. And you know what, Wileman didn’t embarrass herself, she took Liza’s signature song and gave it everything she had and ended up owning it, at least for last night (we still love you Liza). All in all it was a night, and a glorious gift from London with love. Thank you Billy Stritch, and thank you Debbie Wileman, I think you’re the most.

 JUDY GARLAND IN AUSTRALIA

A Message From Gary Horrocks, president of The International Judy Garland Club.

I’ve recently resumed working on a LONG awaited, interminably delayed issue of the International Judy Garland Club journal ‘Judy Garland – a Celebration’ that honours the memories of the late Lorna Smith, who passed away in 2020. It was an honour and a privilege to be her friend for twenty years, to deliver her eulogy, publish her obituary in the UK newspaper The Guardian and intern her ashes in the Memorial Gardens at Stoke Poges, where Judy filmed scenes for her final and only British movie ‘I Could Go On Singing.’ 

Judy’s ‘Through the Years’ was played at Lorna’s funeral and the order of service included a photograph of Lorna at Judy’s surprise 40^th birthday party at Shepperton Studios in 1962. The image captures Lorna presenting, on behalf of the Club, a special gold brooch of a small bird alighting on a branch next to its nest. In the nest were three pearl eggs and the bird’s eye was a ruby.

My friendship with Lorna was rooted in a mutual love for Judy Garland. Lorna was the stuff of legend across the international Judy community, having headed up her fan club with Garland’s blessing and approval since 1963. (Between 1956 and 1963 she led the UK chapter of the North American Club, founded in September 1955 by the great Albert Poland.)

Lorna was the editor of the Club’s prestigious journal Rainbow Review throughout the sixties, using her considerable writing skills and meticulous attention to detail, to capture for posterity significant moments in Garland’s career. Her book ‘Judy with Love’, published in 1975, was an intimate study of Garland stripped of Hollywood veneer and edifice. Heavily abridged by the publisher, I spent many hours with Lorna, discussing and re-writing the excised detail, memories and anecdotes for future fans and historians to read. We managed to publish Judy and Lorna’s story up until 1963, and Lorna’s remaining articles, painstakingly handwritten by her, will follow.

During a recent nostalgic spring clean, I excavated a PDF copy of the Club journal ‘Judy Garland – a Celebration’, issue 6, summer 2014, dedicated in its entirety to Judy’s controversial tour of Australia in 1964. ‘Celebration & Despair - Twelve Days in the Life of Judy Garland.’ I was amazed, and somewhat emotional after a bumpy run of personal and family turbulence, to realise that I’d taken on the editorship of the Rainbow Review in 1998 in readiness for the Club’s 35^th anniversary, and that March 2023 marks the 60^th anniversary of the Club and its beautiful publications. 

Between June 1963 and Summer 1991 there were 62 issues of Rainbow Review! A diminutive, slimmer new series issue 1 started October of the same year and continued in that format until the September/December issue 20 in 1997. I stepped in with a new look Rainbow Review - issue 21, 1998 - restoring the journal to its original dimensions in a ‘glossy 10 by 8’ format loaded with research, writing and RARE photographs kindly donated by Garland aficionados across the world. There were also numerous newsletters, bulletins and Club events during this period. My final issue of Rainbow Review was issue 34 2006 when I took a hiatus from the Club, resurrecting the publication under the new title ‘Judy Garland – a Celebration’ in 2010 when the late, great writer and Garland historian Steve Sanders encouraged me to ‘make a comeback.’ 

In honour of the Club and the journal, I would like to dedicate this special PDF issue to Judy’s 2022 centenary celebrations and offer it as a gift to the international Garland community.

I am especially proud of this Australia edition, and I do hope that you will share my enthusiasm. By this point in my editorial career I had won the trust of many collectors who would post me their photographs so I could painstakingly scan them and return the cherished items. This issue is LOADED with many exclusive and fascinating images, and sets Judy’s Australian visit in context. 

In July 2004 one of the Club’s Australian members, the late Ian Stahlhut, sent me a rough draft of a book he’d been writing, ‘Judy in a Land Called Oz’. It was his attempt after a decade of research to revisit Garland’s May 1964 concerts in Sydney and Melbourne. He’d already produced a seventy-minute documentary on the subject and the logical next step was to publish, for posterity, the story behind this often-controversial visit. The manuscript was extensive but very rough, requiring significant edits, but the essential raw material was in place. I was immensely proud and honoured when Ian wrote asking that he’d ‘appreciate any advice and guidance on where to go from here.’ The project never came to fruition as Ian sadly passed away, but the draft lived on and provided the perfect opportunity to publish highlights so that his immense efforts could be preserved and disseminated to the wider Garland community. Ian left no stone unturned, trawling through Australia’s media archives to excavate newspaper and magazine coverage, video, audio material, rare and unpublished photographs and recordings of press conferences; lovingly transcribed and assimilated with one-to-one, in-depth interviews. I studied the manuscript, selecting segments that I felt would be of particular interest, offering my own interpretation of some of the events, and refreshing and revising some sections. I also supplemented this with some complementary research to produce a consistent narrative and story, incorporating my original essay on the Sydney concerts, that appeared in issue twenty-four of the new series of the Rainbow Review, Spring 2000. (This was reproduced in the final issue of the Australian Judy Garland Appreciation Society’s magazine ‘Rainbow Over Oz’, issue seventeen, December 2002 before it ceased publication.)

Special thanks go to Club members past and present who provided additional photographs, anecdotes and observations. Fedoras off to the late Pat McMath and Lorna Smith for capturing the contemporary coverage in the ‘Garland Gazette’ and ‘Rainbow Review’ respectively, to the late Sonny Gallagher for reviewing some two hundred and thirty-four articles that appeared in the Australian newspapers over April and May for a Club bulletin in June 1964 and to Max Preeo for his Garland News bulletin dated 2nd June, 1964.

The world has moved on since I published my final acknowledgements to this special issue. My gratitude and thanks still go out to Alex Dionysiou, my late and very missed lifelong friend Stephen Braddock, Hilary Placito, Kim Lundgreen, Daniel 'Buzz Stephens' Berghaus, John Fricke. Richard Leslie and Greg Pringle. 

Please visit the Club web pages at: http://www.judygarlandclub.org/ for links to further information and wonderful videos, including interviews with Lorna Smith and our special half hour 'Judy in London, 1957' documentary.

So, here you go. 

Fifty-two glorious pages of Judy in Australia. 

Please share with the community and give us your thoughts and comments.

 

This posting has come to you courtesy of Gary Horrocks, president of The International Judy Garland Club and Robin D'Amato, administrator of The Judy Garland Experience.

https://youtu.be/xX-vwU-wLOk