Home > Reviews > 1983 The Apollo Victoria

'Love' concusses all

The Times, 17 May 1983

Review by Irving Wardle.

Unlike other star performers who have filled London's most cavernous houses with rapturous fans, Liza Minnelli is not so much electrifying as electrified. That slight figure, all elbows and knees and prominent teeth, seems designed for insignificance, but once she gets going it is as if someone has thrown a master-switch.

It is not simply that she is giving her all, but that she has been plugged into some outside power source, making her limbs pulse, her voice soar, and her jagged hair almost spring up in spikes.

The obvious source is her twelve-piece band which functions as a generator, particularly when she matches her own brazen vocal equipment against its six-strong brass section.

The same pattern recurs again and again: there is Minnelli as an urchin waif confronting the world with a wide-eyed gaze as some whispered appeal trembles on her lips; then the boys get blowing and this fragile figure changes into a striding, masterful goddess, flooding the building with a song of success.

She talks but little with the house, and the only revelation she offered last night was that her favourite form of music was "the old English folk ballad" (a likely story). Otherwise it is only to introduce the next number.

One part of her appeal is that she is volcanical1y energetic without the least sign of aggression; and that she overflows with comradely warmth towards her musicians and co-dancers (David Gibson and a piece of india rubber dynamite called Jamie Torcellini).

What becames wearing is the way in which every piece of material she touches (with the exception of a bitter Aznavour conversation number) becomes homogenized into the Minnelli success story. She comes on singing 'Manana', and as she puts it over it means that something wonderful really is going to happen tomorrow. 'God Bless the Child (that's got his own)' changes from a song of destitution, as it was for Billie Holliday, into yet another strident affirmatibn of coming out on top. The head jerks back at the end, the arm goes up in a victory salute, and you are left in no doubt that Minnelli has got her own.

Again, if she sings 'September Song' it is sandwiched inside Brecht's song of Bilbao, as a melancholy middle-eight leading to a trumphant reprise.

Changing from a black trouser suit to an electric blue mini-sack, and finally into pink toreador pants for the second act acrobatics, she certainly raised the roof last night. But in doing so she left a few causalties behind. I thought Gretchen Cryer's 'People Change' an indestructible song; but I reckoned without Minelli's trumpets, and her readiness to sacrifice the lyrics as long as that word 'love' came ringing through on top.

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