Home > Reviews > 1991 Royal Albert Hall

Liza live is Miss Showbiz with a Zee...

The Daily Mail, 31 October 1991

Review by Shaun Usher.

Anyone can stop a show - providing they're gifted, hardworking, beautiful, lucky or preferably all four at once.

Stopping a film is quite a trick, though. Liza Minnelli does it in her current hit, Stepping Out, transending the screen's flatness to register as live and three-dimensional enough to set staid British cinemagoers clapping, a nigh-unheard of happening.

So imagine the showbiz voltage when Liza with a Zee (for zest, zeal, you name it) really is in-person live... plug her in and she could power a sizeable town. Electrifying the Albert Hall? No problem.

There are better female singers though not that many. Dandier dancers, too. But very few, arguably none, who can match La Minnelli's fusion of music, movement and showily-shared emotions. Not even a less than perfect sound system, swiftly improved after her opening number, could disguise the certainty of her success.

Miss Minnelli can take the best her favourite composers John Kander and Fred Ebb, have created for her, bygone pop songs like Teach Me Tonight or a Roy Orbison number, and invest them with the same excitement joy, and sense of occasion.

It helps that she's in love with rhythm radiating an aura of dancing while standing dead still. When she moves, one's spirits rise. What with those eyes, evoking a Bush Baby on speed, and the dazzling smile almost too big for the unchangingly gamine face, she's an act in herself, with the big singing as a bonus.

Liza Minnelli can even sell me that dire Vegas-room sincerity - no kidding, she extolled working with her Stepping Out co-star, 'your crazy, wonderful Julie Waiters'. And make me overlook the marketing of a programme - all right, souvenir brochure, I couldn't find a proper programme - which at £8 costs more that some rival's shows, and turned out to be all pictures, not a single word of information...

Irrelevant grumbles, once she starts working her razzmatazz magic. Hands together for a phenomenon, at once a cliche and an endangered species these days: The Genuine Entertainer.

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