Tracie Bennett To Play Judy Garland in Terry Johnson-Directed End of the Rainbow

Tracie Bennett will star as Judy Garland in Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow, to run February 5-20 at Theatre Royal Northampton. Terry Johnson will direct the production.

Quilter’s play looks at the final months of Garland’s life. The show includes some of her best-known songs, including “Get Happy,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “The Trolley Song,” “The Man That Got Away,” and, from The Wizard of Oz, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The cast will also feature Hilton McRae as Garland’s musical director with Stephen Hagan as her fiancé-turned-fifth husband Mickey Deans.

Bennett performed in an earlier incarnation of the play at London’s New End Theatre in 2001, when it ran under the title of The Last Song of the Nightingale and an unnamed American diva was a thinly disguised version of Garland. More recently, Bennett has been seen in the West End in productions such as Hairspray and La Cage aux Folles.

Johnson directed the recent West End revival of La Cage and will repeat those duties for the Broadway transfer of the production. His many other directing credits include The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Rain Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and his own plays Piano/Forte, Hitchcock Blonde, and Dead Funny.

For further information, visit: www.whatsonstage.com.