This month I’m launching Backgrounders, a monthly illustrated intensive look into a person or event in the arts news that I don’t have space for on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise. Please let me know if you’d like to receive Backgrounders. There will be a small charge for it. I’m not greedy, Theatrewise remains free and Backgrounders will cost $1 a week. Here’s a free sample, a Backgrounder on Liza Minnelli.
It’s Liza’s birthday this week. She’s 78, and we haven’t seen her on-stage for more than ten years but if I say ‘Liza’ you know who I mean, don’t you? One of the few stars who needs only a first name to conjure up a face, a body, a talent, a lifetime of performances.
What comes to mind? Cabaret, of course, that long-legged whirlwind in black fishnet tights, throwing herself around the Kit Kat Club, showing the world what a great dancer could do with Bob Fosse’s choreography and a great singer with Kander and Ebb’s songs.
Here’s Mein Herr from Cabaret:
And yet, Liza isn’t a great singer or a great dancer. She made you believe shewas by her total commitment to her tawdry, vulnerable night-club singer Sally Bowles, and she made you believe in her too. Her childlike neediness made us root for her – for Liza as well as for Sally – because we knew that it wasn’t all pretence. Her vulnerability, we sense, is real. She didn’t just want the audience to love her, she needed us to love her, that hint of desperation giving her performance an edge that can’t be faked.
As everyone knows, she was the daughter of the legendary entertainer Judy Garland and the scarcely less legendary movie director Vincent Minnelli. It was far from a stable homelife. Her father who adored her, was loving but inattentive and the couple divorced, acrimoniously, when Liza was 5. It didn’t help that he was gay.
Judy had been forcefed drugs by Louis B. Mayer, with the full agreement of her mother, since she was 13 so it’s hardly surprising that she needed drugs and eventually also alcohol, to get through every day. Judy Garland had two more children after Liza, with husband No.3 (of 5) and loved them all but was never in any condition to be a good mother. But look at them in their first television show together. The affection and pride from the both is unmistakeable.
When Liza was 23 her mother died. After a childhood filled with uncertainty and insecurity in which her mother’s love, while haphazard, was at least constant, Liza was inconsolable.
What is astonishing is that Liza, and indeed her sister Lorna, ever made it to adulthood although their brother, Joey, almost didn’t.
She won her first Tony at 19 for Flora, The Red Menace, and followed it with Tony award nominations for every Broadway show she was in after that, winning four, culminating, of course, with that magical year of 1973 when she won an Oscar for Cabaret, and an Emmy for Liza With a Z.
For comparison, take a look at this version of All That Jazz with Goldie Hawn. Without meaning to, Liza beats Goldie on all levels.
A Liza Minnelli concert was, in her heyday, an event of pure delight. making us, by the magic of her style, combined with her acting and technical skills, want to get up and dance with her. She took every song as an individual play, the lyrics coming to life in her delivery, the music coming a distant second to her determination that her audience would wring every syllable of meaning from her choice to sing that particular song. You were never in doubt about what Liza thought about every song she chose or, for that matter, every line in every song she chose. Even more than her mother, Liza was the greatest story-teller in song.
Take a look at this, for my money, one of the best show documentaries ever made. Here’s Liza With a ‘Z’.
Liza:A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story is a new documentary by Bruce David Klein. It will be shown on PBS this week in the United States, but not until later in the year in the UK. It received rave reviews when it was shown in June at the Tribeca Festival in New York. Variety called it “scintillating”, The Wrap called it “delightful”, and The Hollywood Reporter called it “gorgeous”. I can’t wait to see it.
If you live near a PBS station in the US it can now be streamed free on https://www.pbs.org/video/
But, in the meantime, watch this. It’s Liza, not in costume, not playing a role, just singing and talking. It’s an excerpt from a Jay Leno show from 1995. You can either watch the entire clip including two great songs and a late night interview or scroll on to 10minutes and 15 seconds to the second song. Unbeatable.
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