The New Yorker's John Lahr on LIZA'S BACK AT THE PALACE

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 12:36pm

This from the son of the Cowardly Lion.

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Two solipsists onstage.
by John Lahr



Liza Minnelli’s new show, “Liza’s at the Palace,” her second comeback, begins and ends with Minnelli in a pin spot, striking her iconic triumphant pose: legs apart, right arm raised, fingers reaching to the sky. But is it a hail—or a heil? The show feels more like a rally than a recital. Minnelli has jazz in her voice but not in her soul. She is all chutzpah and calculation. Although she has vast amounts of energy and an overwhelming desire to please, she has, strange to say, very little sense of fun. Instead of taking you on a journey with her renditions, she continually brings you back to her, to the legend of her collapse—the divorces, the drinking, the depressions—and to her theatrical pedigree, which includes her godparents, Ira Gershwin and Kay Thompson, who more or less take care of the second act.

Under the cunning direction of Ron Lewis, and backed by a first-rate big band, Minnelli puts on a performance that is less about craft than about crowd control. She can sure whip up her fans. The day I saw the show, after each of the nineteen songs on the playlist, people in the orchestra seats jumped to their feet to cheer the diminutive dynamo. “You’re fabulous!” “We love you!” voices called from the darkness. “Don’t you ever, ever think that I don’t know I’m up here because of you,” she replied, pandering and picking their pockets at the same time. (Seats cost up to a hundred and twenty-six dollars.) In one song, written especially for the show, Minnelli promises her audience, “I would never leave you”—a truly terrifying piece of show-biz flimflammery. In fact, what she means to say is the opposite: Please, don’t leave me.

What is it about Minnelli that audiences love? Not her voice, which is weak in the middle registers. Not her dancing or her diction, both of which are less than crisp. Most star turns make a show of perfect poise; Minnelli puts on a show of perfect discombobulation. The spectacle of survival is the thrill. Minnelli hangs on to the piano between songs like a prizefighter grabbing the ropes; she pulls a director’s chair out from the wings and sings a few songs sitting down; she makes a point of loudly catching her breath, and, fetchingly, on the day I saw the show, she even asked to redo a botched stanza, because “I’m an obsessive-compulsive, and I won’t sleep unless I get it right.”

Minnelli reminds me of a gas fire: she looks good, she gives off a kind of heat, but she’s not real. Masquerade, not meaning, is her forte. (“Oh!” she says, full of faux wonder at the set she’s been singing on for a week. “Isn’t it beautiful!”) Her rousing trademark numbers, “Cabaret” and “New York, New York”—each of which ends an act—play to the unrelenting brightness of her surface. (The show is noticeably short on love songs; to sing them well requires some nuanced familiarity with one’s inner life—apparently a bad neighborhood that Minnelli prefers to stay away from.) In “Palace Medley”—“I’m proud to play the Palace / It’s like a dream come true”—Minnelli invokes a long list of great vaudeville acts, and links herself to their glorious tradition. If she is part of that tradition, she’s a decadent one: in her performance, there is vitality but no joy, technique but no truth. If you stand for that, you’ll stand for anything.
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[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 12:54pm

Since I was a child, a young gay boy, I've always been immune to what so many of my friends consider to be Liza's charms. I have to say The Cowardly Lion's Son puts my general reaction to her in words and phrases that resonate with me, which I'd never have thought of on my own. The top six are:

"perfect discombobulation"

"jazz in her voice but not in her soul"

"show-biz flimflammery"

"full of faux wonder"

"pandering and picking their pockets"

"all chutzpah and calculation"

To me, to be a fan and follower of someone you enter an implied social contract. I LOVE Bette Midler, for instance. When I go see one of her shows (and I have seen many), the audience contract with her is pretty clear. We already love her and can't wait to bask in her talent. With that all out of the way, Bette is free to display her divinity and devote her time to putting on a show the audience will love.

Liza, on the other hand, has devoted people who love her in her audience but she wastes terrific amounts of time working too hard to win the love they already freely give her. How can she devote herself to putting on a good show when her whole thing is some twisted co-dependent psychodrama with Liza terrified she's going to be abandoned again and she's reduced to symbolically begging the fans to reaffirm for her YET AGAIN that they truly love her?

I mean, of COURSE she misses shows due to dehydration, she has to! A co-dependent person needs to test the ardor of her lover again and again and again.

Updated On: 12/15/08 at 12:54 PM

[sparrman]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 1:48pm

"This from the son of the Cowardly Lion."

And it's probably totally unnecessary to point this out here, but he's talking about Dorothy's daughter.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 1:50pm

Oh my god, you just made my brain do a cartwheel man.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 1:55pm

Wait--Liza Minnelli is WHOSE daughter?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 2:21pm

Apparently Dorothy or some sh*t. Does he mean like the real Dorothy the story was written about? She had a really sad life, if you read Geoff Ryman's bio of her you know what I mean.

Posted: 12/15/08 at 2:44pm

Wait- John Lahr is the Cowardly Lion's son? But wasn't that Lion Gay? Next you'll tell me Liza did the Tin Man's son or something.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 3:14pm

Impossible. The Tin Man's son is gay.

[givesmevoice]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 3:16pm

Next you'll tell me Liza did the Tin Man's son or something.

when you put it like that, it sounds like incest.

[sparrman]

Posted: 12/15/08 at 3:16pm

"The Tin Man's son is gay."

Toto, too.

[sabrelady]

Posted: 12/20/08 at 10:37pm

And don't forget it was MISS Gulch- spinster school teacher.
Can u get MORE gay?