Once singing starts, a star is reborn

Created and destroyed by her early fame, Judy Garland naturally continues to fascinate a culture obsessed with celebrity. She has attained that odd status of "icon," both more and less than fully human: someone whose face we recognize instantly and yet someone who remains essentially unknown. You'd know her voice anywhere, but do you remember anything she ever said offstage?

So it's eerie to watch Kathy St. George create both a public and a private portrait of Garland in Tony McLean's uneven labor of love, "And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Judy Garland." McLean, admirably, wants to present more than an evening of impersonation, and in St. George he's found his ideal star. Not only does she look and sound uncannily like Garland; she goes beyond mannerism to create a real sense of the woman behind the image.

McLean encourages us to think about that private person by opening with a long monologue, spoken into the microphone of a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He adapted this scene from the tapes Garland made in 1964, in preparation for an autobiography that would never be published. Unfortunately, what we hear of the tapes makes it all too clear why no one turned them into a book.

Alone in a London hotel, Garland drinks as she keeps trying to loosen up and tell her story. But the wine brings out her bitterness, her loneliness, and her anger at the betrayals she feels she's suffered in business and in love. She slurs her words, though she says she doesn't think that matters as long as her thoughts aren't slurred. She yells and cries; she even sings a little to herself.

Clearly, we're meant to hear all this as a revelation of the private pain that both deepened and damaged Garland's art. And St. George delivers it all with haunting expertise, creating a vivid, aching portrait of a woman who can't stop seeing herself as a victim. Clearly, too, we're meant to carry the memory of this scene into the next one, which replicates a Garland concert with startling fidelity: to marvel at the singing, but to remember always what a dark place it came from.

The problem is that, in practice, listening to an intoxicated woman ranting about her tax problems, her cruel ex-husband, and her chiseling agents is a bit of a bore. In performance, Garland had a raw vulnerability that was also her greatest strength; her tremulous voice and liquid eyes held more sorrowful knowledge of the world's hurts than we could imagine one person bearing. But it gives us no deeper insight to learn the banal details of exactly what it was she carried.

Still, once St. George starts singing, the show comes fully alive. She always has a gorgeous voice, but here she works the double miracle of singing beautifully, and singing beautifully while sounding like someone else. Whether playful or soulful, she captures the mercurial moods that Garland brought to every song. And what songs: "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," "The Trolley Song," "The Man That Got Away," and more -- ending, of course, with the one you knew she had to sing, the one that captures all the yearning of a young woman longing to follow the bluebirds to the place she's dreamed of. When St. George soars into that unmistakable opening octave, then floats along with deceptive ease on the melody's ravishing stream, she tells us everything we need to know about Judy Garland, the girl, the woman, and the tragic legend.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.