Stepping Into Judy's Palace Medley

“And all around me I hear voices that I can’t ignore,

The voices of the stars who played the Palace long before.

The stars who entertained you until the rafters rang —

You don’t need their names, for the whole world acclaims them

For the wonderful songs they sang…”

~Roger Edens, introduction to the "Judy at the Palace Medley"

As someone who spends a lot of her time listening to voices emerging from scratchy recordings and then trying to inhabit them, these lines were insistently reaching out to me every time I got to this point in Judy Garland's recording of her "Judy at the Palace Medley." It was some time back in the autumn of 2015, and I was trying to decide which tune to add next to my Garland repertoire — either to the second half of my Symphonic Pops concert or to my nascent cabaret show. I'd been “auditioning” a lot of numbers from her many post-1950 recordings, but this one was having the same dramatic effect on me every time I heard it...

…And I was resisting it tooth and nail.

“Yes”: My Journey into the Wonderful World of Orchestration and Meeting Some Wizards

During the past five months I’ve been on a very steep learning curve — actually, more like something involving tornadoes and the yellow brick road — but on January 21st I’m going to get to share with 2000 people some of the results of the arduous journey: I’m going to get to sing two of Judy Garland’s original arrangements onstage with a symphony orchestra.

Of course, I’ve been singing Judy’s tunes with orchestras for a few years now, in wonderful arrangements based on the originals by two terrific arrangers (see an earlier post, "Getting Happy"). But for someone like me who loves time travel and Judy, suddenly having access to the actual note-for-note arrangements that we’ve all heard on her albums was an incredible stroke of good fortune that I’d never even allowed myself to hope for.

Here’s how it happened:

Joan EllisonJanuary 1, 2017Judy Garland, Joan Ellison, Nelson Riddle, Come Rain or Come Shine, Orchestration, Hollywood, Classic Movie Musicals, Conrad Salinger, MGM, Michael Feinstein, Larry Blank, Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Carl Topilow, NEOS Dance Theatre, Capitol Records, Golden Age of Film, Arthur FreedComment