Home > Reviews > 2002 Royal Albert Hall

She must survive

The Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 2002

Review by Glyn Brown.

It's a camp old night, but we knew it would be. "My goodness," marvels warm-up act Graham Norton, surveying the audience. "It's just like a rent boy convention." He overstates his point: this show isn't about sex. It's about survival.

Only a year ago, having conquered booze and drugs, Liza Minnelli fell so ill they were almost polishing her coffin. Now, with her new husband David Gest as her manager, she has gained confidence and lost 90lb. When she takes the stage - dripping with spangles, eyelashes like tarantulas on acid, jet hair which belies her 55 years, jokey vulnerability - she's a heady mix of Marticia Addams and Lenny the Lion.

The show's first half is dubious. There's a new song about being "happy and healthy and ready to rock", and Mary J Bilge's funked-up Family Affair. She then offers Roy Orbison's notoriously difficult Crying, whose top note she declines. Still, her range seems close to top form. Once or twice she mimes; elsewhere, her smoker's wheeze between verses proves it's the real thing.

There are too many declamatory show tunes, some of them mind-numbingly dull. The audience adore it - but then, it's a dynasty they're applauding, not just a performance.

Act Two, and she emoting twice as hard, in a red feathered cape like a giant emu. Her Pet Shop Boys collaboration, Losing My Mind, mercifully picks up the pace, as does a sexy, Berliner-style Mein Herr.

During New York, New York she runs to hug her husband (bald, stolid, alarmingly like Uncle Fester). Maybe This Time is freighted with meaning ("Lady peaceful, lady happy/ That's what I long to be"). And Cabaret is uproarious - an explosive vindication of life lived the Liza way, cutely altered to suit her new lifestyle: "When I go, I'm NOT going like Elsie!"

At the end she tells us again and again how much she loves us. No one - apart from her mother - was ever so needy. I hope it all works out.

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