End of the Rainbow review: Jinkx Monsoon is the Judy Garland London needed

Peter Quilter's play about Judy Garland's final London performances returns with Jinkx Monsoon in the role. Monsoon delivers something that goes well beyond precision, in a production that does not flinch from its subject.

Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, 2026. Photo by Danny Kaan.

Written by

Oliver Popa

Article type :

Critic Review

Published on

23 May 2026

The first thing you see is a man alone at a piano, picking out the opening bars of Over the Rainbow like he is waiting for something bad to happen. He is. When Garland arrives, he ducks under it.

That detail stays with you. The whole evening is in it.

Peter Quilter's play has been around since 2005, when Caroline O'Connor originated the role in Sydney. Tracie Bennett brought it to the West End in 2010 and Broadway two years later, earning an Olivier nomination and a Tony nomination. Renée Zellweger took it to film in 2020. Each version has had to answer the same question, which is whether anyone can carry two and a half hours of a woman coming apart at close range. The answer here is not in any doubt, though it takes a few minutes to fully understand what you are watching.

The setting is London, 1968. Garland is preparing a residency at the Talk of the Town, months before her death at 47. The addiction ran back to her teenage years at MGM, where studio executives were rationing her pills to keep the shooting schedule moving. Quilter treats that not as backstory but as the whole subject. There is no earlier version of Judy to compare this one against.

Jasmine Swan's set is white drapes over stepped levels, a black piano at the centre, a chandelier above. The band sits behind a curtain and is only revealed when Judy performs. It is a simple decision and it makes its point without underlining it.

*^{Jacob Dudman, Jinkx Monsoon, and Adam Filipe in End of the Rainbow. Photo by Danny Kaan.}*

The show runs long. The hotel scenes in the first act accumulate past the point where that accumulation is doing real work, and there are stretches where Quilter's script leans too hard on the same dynamic, Judy chaotic, Mickey controlling, Anthony watching helplessly, cycling through again. Jacob Dudman's Mickey has a coiled watchfulness that works well enough, though I found myself wanting something darker underneath it, some glimpse of what he actually wants beyond managing her. Adam Filipe as Anthony plays the role with a particular stillness. There is a scene late in the second act where the two of them simply sit together and very little happens. It is the most honest five minutes in the show, and I am still not entirely sure why it hit as hard as it did.

*^{Filipe as Anthony and Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, 2026. Photo by Danny Kaan.}*

What Jinkx Monsoon does here I find genuinely difficult to write about cleanly. The voice is extraordinary, the physical work total, the comic timing exact. None of that is the surprising part. The surprising part is the concert sequences, when Judy begins to lose the thread mid-performance, missing a cue, staring at the microphone cord as though she cannot account for it. You stop watching a performer demonstrate collapse. You start feeling something closer to alarm. The room went very still. I was not prepared for that.

At the end she sings Over the Rainbow in a gown, and red petals fall from above, and she reaches up with both hands to catch one. After two and a half hours of a woman unable to hold onto anything, it is almost unbearable.

If its ending is a tad mawkish, it offers a moment of sombre reflection many will appreciate for what is, in its last breaths, a sorry story. This is not the Judy of A Star is Born. It is the Judy of a star in decline. But in Jinkx Monsoon, another star rises.