Countdown to Judy

Week three of our countdown to Rufus Wainwright’s re-creation of Judy Garland’s show at Carnegie Hall, and it’s time to talk to the money guys. As Jared Geller (who’s coproducing the show with David Foster) tells TONY, it was doubtful at first whether this particular train would even leave the station. “When I was working on Kiki & Herb at Carnegie Hall, back in 2004,” Geller recalls, “Rufus told me, ‘I have this idea for a show, but you can’t tell anybody.’ He said he wanted to perform the famous Judy Garland concert at Carnegie Hall. I was taken aback and I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anybody because that’s insane.’ But then we kept talking about it. Between his schedule and Carnegie’s, I think it was a year ago that we finally secured June 14 and 15.”

Between finding a free spot in Wainwright’s schedule and finding back-to-back dates at the famed 57th Street room, the process was arduous. “You can’t just call Carnegie Hall and say you want to do a show there,” Geller says. “They don’t have defined requirements, it’s not like you have to clear hurdles—well, you do have to clear their hurdles. They really want to be artistically satisfied, they wanted to know it’d be something worthy of being on their stage.” Still, it can’t have been any more difficult than convincing them that Kiki & Herb deserved to be there, can it? Geller laughs. “Well, that was much more difficult to do, I will admit. I forgot about that. But with this one, once they got it they were really supportive and excited. Creatively they’re not that involved but so much of the hall is part of the show, you know? We do ask them what we can do. For lights, for instance, we ask them what we can make happen. Normally at Carnegie Hall it’s lights up, lights down. We are going to do something more complicated so we’re working with them to see how we can accomplish that. We were talking to the production manager at Carnegie, and he told us which elements would be standard and which ones Judy would not have had. We want to do the show as close as possible to how she did it.”

These days, Geller is scouring theaters for Wainwright to rehearse in: “We rehearsed in a 600-seat theater two weeks ago. We were at John Jay, which has a space called the Lynch, and also at the Jewish Heritage Museum. It would have been much easier to be in a rehearsal room, but Rufus wanted a feel for performing this material on a stage.”——Elisabeth Vincentelli

· Week 1: Rufus Wainwright
· Week 2: Stephen Oremus
· Week 3: Jared Geller
· Week 4: Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoere
· Week 5: Rufus Wainwright
· Week 6: Phil Ramone
· Week 7: Kate McGarrigle