Regina Fringe performer brings show on Judy Garland’s rival

It’s hard to picture but there was a time when somebody could upstage Judy Garland.

Her Winnipeg-born rival was Hollywood’s biggest star and the world’s highest-paid woman in the early 1940s.

That was Deanna Durbin, the subject of Melanie Gall’s Regina Fringe show “Ingenue: Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland and the Golden Age of Hollywood.”

“It was Deanna Durbin who was hired at the same time. The two of them were constantly compared in newspapers and magazines and Deanna Durbin always came out on top,” Gall said on The Greg Morgan Morning Show on Thursday.

“(It was) the influence that she had on movies, on acting. She saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. There would be no Universal. ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Jaws’ — none of that would have been made had it not been for Deanna Durbin.”

Then, at 27 years old, Durbin quietly left show business, moving to France and never looking back.

“My show’s about the two of them (Durbin and Garland), their relationship as friends and rivals and about the music that people just don’t know from Deanna Durbin,” Gall said.

This is Gall’s seventh year performing at the Regina Fringe Festival. She grew up in St. Albert, Alta., from a long lineage of singers. Her great-grandfather and grandfather were professional vocalists and her mother sang as well.

“I knew I was going to do this. I just didn’t know exactly how,” she said.

Gall holds music degrees from the University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario as well as schools in Europe and the U.S. That took her to performances at famed venues like Carnegie Hall in Toronto, Lincoln Centre in New York and Royal Albert Hall in London.

These days, Gall makes her living by selling the shows to theatre companies.

This year’s Regina Fringe Festival features 21 shows.

“Ingenue: Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland and the Golden Age of Hollywood” plays until Sunday at St. Mary’s Anglican Church.