You sometimes get the impression, in every sense, that there are more Judy and Liza impersonators in every piano bar and even lowlier dive in New York than any other personalities, dead or alive. Something in the heroic talents of both – and the even more disturbing abilities to send their lives into self-destructive patterns that mother and daughter have shared, too – makes their lives into parables of struggle, survival and larger-than-life interest. One of the most talked-about shows at this year’s Edinburgh fringe was The End of the Rainbow, a play chronicling Garland’s struggle to get through a performance at the Talk of London, with Caroline O’Connor giving a powerhouse turn as Garland, at the Assembly Hall.
Tucked away at C Venues, meanwhile, was Liza – in the shape of New York drag performer Rick Skye with his show A Slice O’Minnelli. I missed it in Edinburgh, but I am delighted that I finally caught it at the Theatre Museum last night in the season he is performing there to Sunday. The downstairs picture gallery has been turned into a delightful, intimate cabaret boite, complete with tables at the front.
I have always loved Liza, even as I’ve watched the dispiriting decline of her talents as she’s wrestled with the demons of prescription drugs, bad marriages and ageing. Only yesterday she was in the papers again, as the charges and counter-charges from her last marriage to David Gest were being pored over. (Skye’s show is so bang up-to-date that he brings The Guardian story into the show). But this astounding show – part tribute, part parody, but altogether as loving as it is truthful – summonses not just the material or mannerisms for which she is best known, but provides its own delicious commentary on them.
Liza duly returns with a zing. This is like the Liza of old again – the insecurities are on open display, but so is the blazing talent. It’s like being taken back to another era in my ongoing love affair with the most exhilarating of all live performers I’ve ever been lucky enough to see for real, but finding her at the height of her powers once more. What a difference from her last Broadway appearance in her tribute to her father at the Palace Theatre in 1999 in Minnelli on Minnelli, and for all the affectionate first-person connection she brought to the material, I found myself shedding a tear not for the stories she was telling but for the fact that she wasn’t able to cut it anymore. Then there was the tour, after her marriage to Gest, which came to the Royal Albert Hall (and then New York’s Beacon Theatre), where she was also a tentative shadow of her former self, though it was intriguing on both occasions I saw her on either side of the Atlantic she visibly grew in confidence as the audience fed her their affection.
But the best way of seeing Liza live now is clearly to see Skye. And it only costs £15, too!
