IT may be time for a moratorium on Liza Minnelli’s career death watch. This in defatigable performer has endured so many problems – personal and physical – and has had so many comebacks that, in terms of sheer drama, she’s outdone her famous mother.
Now, six years after her last triumphant appearances at the Beacon, she’s back on Broadway, in the same theater Judy Garland played decades ago.
Sorry to disappoint all you vultures out there, but she’s done it again: “Liza’s at the Palace . . . !” is the sort of late-career triumph of which show-business mythology is made.
Looking and sounding better than she has in years, the 62-year-old delivers a knockout show that combines many of her best-known hits with a loving tribute to her godmother, Kay Thompson.
Sure, the machinery creaks a little. The voice doesn’t have the range or power it once had, and at one point she seemed to nearly collapse after a particularly vigorous dance number. But the visible effort she puts in actually works to her advantage, lending the proceedings a heroic quality that only accentuates the emotional impact of her resurrection.
From her dramatic entrance – in which she’s seen in silhouette striking her iconic pose, arm outstretched – to the touching finale in which she performs her mother’s trademark “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the show’s been staged by veteran director/choreographer Ron Lewis for maximum effect.
Numbers such as the new “I Would Never Leave You,” a musical love letter to her loyal fans, and the hilarious “If You Hadn’t But You Did,” in which she mimes shooting a philandering lover and then casually stepping over his dead body, cannily reference her personal travails. She also notes the “extensive research” that went into her choice of songs about falling out of love, and pauses, for comic effect, when singing the lyric about “pills and liquor” in “Cabaret.”
True, the Thompson salute, which features a quartet of mature male singer/dancers in a re-creation of her legendary cabaret act, goes on a little too long. But Minnelli displays a newly sensitive interpretive power in such songs as Charles Aznavour’s “What Makes a Man a Man.” And when she delivers signature numbers such as that anthem of survival “And the World Goes ‘Round” and, of course, the classic “New York, New York,” she blends her life and her art in the way that only a true legend can.
LIZA’S AT THE PALACE . . . ! Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway; 212-307-4100. Through Dec. 28.