At last, the truth is out! Matthew Murray has a Split Personality!
'Directed and choreographed with gold-lamé slickness by Ron Lewis, this show is perhaps the ultimate tribute to ultimate tributes - so elaborate and unapologetic in framing its subject that it borders on shameless. What is never in sight, however, is dishonesty. Everything is carefully calculated, whether to arouse sympathy or dampen memories of Minnelli’s addictive and injurious past or her last Palace show (Minnelli on Minnelli, in 1999). Yet the show never lets you catch your breath long enough to feel manipulated.
“Nobody has the right to be the judge of what is right for me,” she growls during “What Makes a Man?”, Charles Aznavour’s paean to secure self-identity. It’s her theme statement here, the dramatic anchor for the three vivid - and very different - characters she embodies: Liza Minnelli, her godmother (and vocal goddess) Kay Thompson, and a humble headliner alone in the crowd with her doting public. Each personality is grossly overplayed, glitteringly unconvincing, and impossibly irreplaceable.'
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/LizaPalace.html (and it's
a Rave.)
"Y'know, I think Bertolt Brecht was rolling in his grave."
-Nellie McKay on the 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, in which she played Polly Peachum