Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall ★★★

From the title alone, anyone coming to see Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall likely expects something outrageous and fun. Happily, on that count the show’s two writers and performers — NYC-based drag/theatre artists Xena Fauxbia (Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin) and Soda Pressed (Adin Lenahan) — do not disappoint.

But this isn’t just frothy Sunday-brunch entertainment, nor is it a slavish reproduction of Garland’s iconic 1961 concert (and live album) Judy at Carnegie Hall. Instead, and more ambitiously, it’s a mostly lip-synched sequined experiment that interweaves numbers from that concert with testimonials about their own personal relationships to weight. It’s a fascinating approach, and a great deal of the show works in clever and unexpected ways, but, like Garland on the movie set of Annie Get Your Gun before she got fired and replaced by Betty Hutton, a lot is excessively messy.

To be fair, much of the mess is intentional; vodka bottles, a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a head of cabbage litter the playing area before Fauxbia and Pressed even appear. And once they arrive and start performing, food is flung here, there, and everywhere; lucky audience members might even get hit by a carb. If not, they’ll at least get to witness bread receive its own kind of worship when “The Man That Got Away” is earnestly sung to an empty hot dog bun.

Brilliant moments like that pop in and out of the show, and Garvin and Lenahan will hopefully keep developing this piece so that it’s consistently strong throughout its 50-minute running time. But the show disappointingly dips into self-congratulatory indulgence near the end before collapsing into it entirely during the overdone curtain call, and, it must be said, some of the lip synching needs to be tighter. If you’re gonna do Judy, you gotta do her right.

This production was reviewed in preview ahead of the Fringe at The Tank