RUFUS AT CARNEGIE HALL.(The Talk of the Town)(Rufus Wainwright)(Concert review)

Not every single New Yorker was focussed on the Rufus Wainwright concert last Wednesday; a cabdriver from Cote d'Ivoire, who was taking one concertgoer to Carnegie Hall, was listening to a tape of a Mandinka-speaking Muslim preacher, which a friend back home in Abidjan had sent him. But certainly in a particular crowd, one that has a sizable membership in this city--Gay Men and the Women Who Love Them--people had been buzzing about this concert for two months. Rufus Wainwright was going to--can you believe this?--re-create the famous, and famously fabulous, concert that Judy Garland gave at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961. That's right: fabulous. Get the record. Then we'll talk. Wainwright's concert sold out immediately, so a second was added, the following night--that sold out immediately, too. E-mails went back and forth: Was this really a good idea? Was it proper, appropriate, really a homage, or was it an insult to the memory of the woman many consider to be the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century? Was it just a bad idea? Was it a funny idea--and, if so, was that a good thing? Maybe: after all, Garland herself had a wicked sense of humor. Whatever was going to happen, it counted as a mustn't-miss event. In anticipation of the concert, Time Out New York had been running short weekly pieces under the heading "Countdown to Judy," and now her fans, and Wainwright's fans, were ready to blast off.

Outside Carnegie Hall before the show, the atmosphere was surprisingly subdued. Perhaps fans were nervous, for Wainwright and for themselves--people who love Judy Garland don't want to have their feelings upset, and there was so much room for error in this enterprise. Older people wondered whether the thirty-two-year-old Wainwright would get it--there was a time not long ago when young gay men actively shunned Judyism as a suffocating remnant of pre-Stonewall closetedness. (In Greenwich Village in the eighties, Judy Garland albums were seen lined up on the curb, their owners dead of AIDS.) But Wainwright was very publicly gay, and his interest in replicating the show had much to do with the music--he has EGBDF in his DNA (his parents are Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III), and at the age of eight he'd be woken up by his mother at three in the morning to sing "Over the Rainbow" as a way of signalling to guests that it was time to go. (Like Garland, Wainwright has had trouble with drugs. Luckily, he has cleaned up his act, and shows no sign that he will waste away before his time, as Garland did, ...