Pitchfork

"When I was a kid, I always wanted to be Dorothy," drawls Rufus Wainwright, between songs, clearly having the time of his life on stage at Carnegie Hall in October 2006. "Except for the bad days, when I wanted to be the Wicked Witch." Rufus Does Judy... is the fulfilment of this childhood wish and the ultimate Judy Garland tribute: A song-by-song recreation of her legendary 1961 set on the same stage, the show which established the troubled singer as "the world's greatest entertainer". As a kind of conceptual drag act, it's comparable to Far From Heaven, where Todd Haynes had a similarly gay old time paying lavish homage to the melodramas of film director Douglas Sirk.

Rufus Does Judy is a lovingly meticulous recreation ("I feel like Judy Garland's secretary!" he sighs at one point), right down to the flubbed lyric in "You Go to My Head" and the babbled banter before "A Foggy Day in London Town", but it's no diligent impression. Wainwright's reedy tenor is no match for Garland's brassy vibrato, but, to his credit, he elegantly outdoes her on a couple of the ballads. Listen again to Garland's original double album-- an oddly primitive recording, full of microphone crashes and a drummer a few clangs short of his trolley-- it's clear that, in concert at least, she was less a singer than an overwhelming dramatic presence, a force of showbiz nature. In fact, in a funny way, the most impressive tracks aren't the songs themselves but rather the astonishing waves of cheers and applause, the sheer rush of devotion from the audience.

That's an intensity that Wainwright clearly craves. On his own records he's seemed increasingly trapped in the prissy prison of his languid chamber pop, an orchid blooming in an arid greenhouse. But his talent is far too gaudy to stay cooped up, and over the course of this performance, channeling the chutzpah, getting high off the roar of the crowd, he comes to high-kicking life. Nothing is too corny for him: "When You're Smiling", "That's Entertainment", even a shit-eating "Swanee". He revels in the broader than Broadway bravado, it seems such a central part of his persona, but it's often simply refined out of his records completely. Of course Garland's real showbiz heir isn't Wainwright-- it's Britney Spears. So I wonder if, at heart, this splendid celebration isn't simply mourning a distant dawn-of-the-60s moment, when it was still possible to believe in the amusements of entertainment, and the chance of happy endings for child stars.

But is this more than just shits and giggles for devotees of the American songbook? Does it have anything to offer the curious yet showtunephobic indie kid? Well, maybe. In the truly Garlandy spirit of family revue, Wainwright introduces his sister Martha, who turns in a stunning, showstopping "Stormy Weather" in an appropriately brazen bid to steal the show. And he himself cuts to the quick of Garland's art with heartfelt performances of the ballads, particularly "Do It Again", "The Man That Got Away", and "If Love Were All".

"I believe that since my life began, the most I've had is just a talent to amuse", sang Garland on that last number in 1961, making Noel Coward's words her own, milking the self-dramatizing self-deprecation that moved her audience so. Sung by Wainwright the words take on a different ring. He already has the arthouse chic, the operatic range, and the high-class plaudits that Garland coveted. You suspect he would dearly love to have "just" that talent, or, in fact, that audience to amuse. He's said that he started listening to the Carnegie Hall album in the weeks and months after September 11, craving some cheap showbiz cheer, but wound up discovering something deeper. Of course, you can dismiss that as camp denial, a kind of wishful clicking together of the heels in the face of terror. But the bluebirds and rainbows of Garland's songs and movies were borne out of real horrors of the 1930s and 40s, and her own very particular demons. What her audience loved about her was her stout, sweaty, determined, ultimately doomed, defiance.