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Pure charm is next step for Minnelli

The Daily Telegraph, 5 December 1978

Review by John Barber.

"I'm so glad I came!" panted Liza Minnelli into the audience that crammed the Palladium to capacity last night - who threw flowers on the stage and kept begging for just one more ear-splitting song from the beloved star.

At the opening of her show she had taken the stage alone and sang unaccompanied in a white slip, releasing that dark velvety vibrato which seems to kiss the back wall with the hiss of the sibilants.

She has improved a lot since I saw her Broadway musical The Act in February, just after she had 'flu. Her stage presence is as diamond-bright - the coltish kid with the street urchin cut, the bee-stung underlip and the flailing energy.

But her high-stepping valour as an artist is no longer compromised by those old giggles, cute asides and oh-gosh-sorry mistakes.

When she gives herself into a song now, we can feel she is vulnerable because her passion is so intense. She no longer needs to peddle vulnerability to us. She has also extended her vocabulary of gurgling rhythms, dirty brown growls and drawling whispers, though there is too much Ethel Mermanly belting out of climaxes.

But her wit! It's not only in her sassy strut for the Cabaret. It is in her mocking pretence to be a connoisseur of old Engish folk-ballads - "Something I think we should go through together" - and the delicate nonsense she turns it all into.

The Minnelli dancing is no more than fun, but her seething vitality unites 2,000 people in joyous acclaim. The scarlet sequins flash, and she spins her body around like a lassoo.

Her band of 11 artists, cleverly introduced in song, is unusually musical. Two dancers, Roger Minami and Obba Babatunde, contrive briefly to be as sinuous as the star, and the whole act has been groomed to within an inch of its life.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the star tried a little less hard, and trusted more to her undeniable and quite unassailable charm.

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