Home > Reviews > 2002 Royal Albert Hall

Spread the news, she's leading today

The Times, 3 April 2002

Review by Allen Robertson.

What else would she do with her honeymoon but spend it on the stage? Liza Minnelli is back in London for five performances at the Albert Hall. It is something of a miracle — not that she is as boisterously entertaining as ever, but that she's here at all. Eighteen months ago, with Minnelli struck down by encephalitis, newspapers were hurriedly cobbling together her obituary. There had already been an operation for nodes on her vocal cords and a couple of hip replacements, to say nothing of her ongoing dependency problems with pills and alcohol addiction.

Stepping back on to the stage seemed a huge risk, but Minnelli is a phoenix, rising from her own ashes. As her mother, Judy Garland, once said: "Liza is pure show business." And she proved it on Tuesday night in front of a roaring, screaming, cheering crowd of enraptured fans (and generations of fellow entertainers from Tony Bennett to Martine McCutcheon and Pet Shop Boys) who gave her nine standing ovations during her two-act, two-hour-plus show. For those susceptible to the volume, the glitz, the energy, Minnelli is as good as it gets.

It wasn't all smooth sailing, however. A couple of the early numbers, which tried to reinvent her as a dance queen, à la Cher, were a mistake, and a couple of the more strenuous, least significant routines were mimed — disgraceful yes, but then it's hard to sing and dance at the same time, especially when you're 56.

But whenever Minnelli turned to her core repertory she tore the roof off. The World Goes Round, Maybe This Time, Some People, Cabaret and an astounding New York, New York were all volcanic. She gave each of them the sort of attack which makes you believe you are witnessing a one-off — but then Minnelli has been producing those sorts of performances and generating that kind of response for decades.

At the end, when it should have been all over, and much to the surprise of her band, Minnelli really went out on a limb. Ordering us to sit, she started to talk about having performed for the Queen Mother. Then, noting that Vera Lynne was in the audience, she launched into I'll Be Seeing You sung a cappella, quietly and with a few missed notes. Talk about knowing how to work an audience.

Like her mother, Minnelli exudes an aura of the little girl lost who just wants to be loved and proves it with a gurgling giggle of a laugh that could so easily trickle into a tear. She seems to hold nothing back. Her attitude is: "If I give you enough love, you will give it all back to me, won't you?" And it happens.

Few entertainers have her charisma. It is something about the way performer and audience thrive on one another's energies. Minnelli isn't a studio artist like Barbra Streisand; she needs an audience to shine. In letting us know this she makes us a part of her act. It's a great talent and, even if it is preprogrammed, it pours across the footlights with the ferocity of a torrent. It might seem old-fashioned to some of today's cynics, but this is showbiz incarnate.

All content on www.LizaOnline.co.uk is archived here without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in reviewing the included information for personal use, non-profit research and educational purposes only. Designed by all lower case.