Nobody can possibly be surprised that a show entitled “Judy Garland Is Fat at Carnegie Hall” is silly and in bad taste. What is more surprising is that the show works. I’ve seen it twice now. The audience was rapturous both times, as the two lip-syncing Judy-dressed performers, whose drag names are Xena Fauxbia and Soda Pressed, riff off of Judy Garland’s famous 1961 comeback concert at Carnegie Hall with an endless stream of visual fat jokes.
“Everything I love is gone,” one of them lip-syncs Judy saying, and empties the last few crumbs from a bag of potato chips. “You made me love you,” both lip-sync one of Judy’s signature songs to their microphones, which they’ve each just used as an Ozempic pen, sticking them in their abdomens. They also guzzle pills from prescription bottles, engage in salacious behavior with hot dog buns and extra-long sausages, feed each other gobs of cake, flaunt their butts at the audience, and roll around on the floor amid a pile of shiny Mylar strips, in a kind of caricature of glamour gone amuck.
I saw “Judy Garland Is Fat at Carnegie Hall” the first time at something called Edfest, a new preview festival that allowed New York artists to try out their shows in front of a live audience at a hip new venue called Brooklyn Art Haus before heading to Edinburgh. I was initially so taken aback by their jokey antics that I thought: How is this mess even theater? How can I possibly review it?
I eventually realized there is craft and even a level of sophistication behind the messiness. The voice-over that the two performers lip-sync are not just old recordings of Judy Garland singing or talking, but also of the performers themselves – whose real names are Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin and Adin Lenahan – maybe creating fictional characters, or maybe talking about their own personal struggles. Sometimes Kaela is lip-syncing Adin’s voice, and vice-versa; sometimes they lip-sync their own voices.
It might be hard at first, given the no-holds-barred humor, to see the sympathy that the performers have for Judy Garland, but it’s made explicit during the only moment in the show that isn’t lip-synced, when they ask each other what they liked most about Judy, and what they like most about themselves. They are revealing here their sense of personal connection to a singer who died 57 years ago, which any audience drawn in by the title is likely to share.
The very silliness of “Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall” makes it resistant to straightforward criticism. But it also typifies a certain kind of fringe show (not just at the Fringe) that effectively creates a communal experience.
***Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall is playing through August 29 at Space 1 at theSpace on the Mile as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
