CityLife

Liza Minnelli

Liza Minnelli

Liza Minnelli
Bridgewater Hall
July 4, 2011

The 4th of July. The day those colonial upstarts removed our monarchy, ultimately to replace it with their own; theirs built not from blue blood, but the hereditary lines of showbiz royalty.

Daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, Liza first graced the silver screen with her mother in 1949, at the grand age of three.

Her first real role came in the movie Charlie Bubbles in 1967, filmed right here in Manchester.

She leverages that fact, a little clunkily, to claim she’s ‘come home’ but that’s showbiz, folks and make no mistake – we are in the presence of royalty. First names are cast about like fabulous confetti. Frank Sinatra, for instance, is ‘Uncle Frank’.

Bouts of ill health have rendered her movements rather jagged, her voice ever more breathless. She references her last album, Confessions, from late last year but is equally generous when getting out the big rocks – the theme tune to Cabaret, Maybe This Time, He’s A Tramp, Our Love Is Here To Stay.

She’s at her most engaging when self-deprecating.

Off-the-cuff allusions to ‘pills and liquor’, her accumulated collection of ex-husbands, her various medical… how shall one put it… ‘amendments’, bringing a willing crowd into her world, on to her stage.

You simply can’t argue with her credentials when she recalls how Frank… sorry, Uncle Frank, phoned to borrow a tune that would become one of his signatures – New York, New York, from her movie of the same name.

She soft shoe shuffles, she stands, she sits. And yet after all her rather frantic movement, she’s most relaxed simply leaning against the grand piano – just the notes and her voice – drawing support from the piano’s weight, from the music it brings.