Liza's At The Palace...And On Your DVD Player, Too

She is one of those rare people who is known by first name only. And that's because beginning when she was just 19, Liza (Minnelli) has dazzled audiences around the world and in every medium. This week, her latest work - the DVD/BluRay recording of her Tony-winning show Liza's At the Palace became available.

It was recorded last October 1 at the Hollywood Theatre of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas but, of course, before that it played aound the world and for a month on Broadway. The show is an amalgam of great music, terrific dancing, an interesting narrative. It is a labor of love. It is, in the end, all Liza.

While the show boasts all of her hits Cabaret, Maybe This Time, And The World Goes Round and New York, New York, it is at the end of the first act and for most of the second act that even material that has been around seemingly forever becomes new again.

First, she talks about playing the Palace In the number called Palace Medley she recalls being a five year-old sitting up front in the audience and she addresses a person sitting up front at her show. "Excuse me Sir. Yes! You right there. When I was five I sat in your chair…I came to see a lady who, in fact, I was related to."

That "lady was, of course, Judy Garland who, 57 years before he daughter did, won a tony for her show at the Palace. (There is video of the award presentation by Helen Hayes on youtube. It's lovely.)

"That song about the Palace is all true," Liza says. "It is my life. Everyhting in that song is real. It became a memory and, in the end, it was still my memory, but I was there on the stage.

"When I played the Palace I used to call on everybody's spirit. You can actually feel it in the floor."

The influence of Liza's godmother Kay Thompson - author of the Eloise books, singer, choreographer - on her was profound.and the second act of the show recreates numbers from Thompson'snightclub act using the original vocalarrangements and a quartet of men standing in for Thompson's supporting singers, the Williams Brothers (yes, Andy was one of them). Liza says, "I adored her so and she was such a huge influence in my life. I was determined to make this show work. It took us two-and-a-half years to get it opened properly. First, we toured Europe - opened in Düsseldorf or someplace like that -and got wonderful reviews.

I said, 'Well, I guess we should bring it to New York.'

"I didn't know it would play at the Palace. At first I thought it should be in a nightclub, just like where Kay performed. I was thinking of the Rainbow Room [the restaurant-supper club on the 65th floor of the RCA - now GE - Building in Rockefeller Center] but it was booked for two years.

"The only place that was open was the Palace so we went there." The DVD includes an affectionate conversation with director-choreographer Ron Lewis, with whom she first worked in the 1970s. Liza wants everyone to know that his influence on the piece is omnipresent and that she is very grateful for his more objective eye. "He was the one who said we had to turn the second act into something apart, into something special. He was right," she says.

There is word floating around that Liza's At the Palace, recorded and shown as the centerpiece shown duing the December 2009 PBS fundraising drive, will bring her another Emmy. (She won the award in 1973 for Liza With A Z) When that possibiity was mentioned to her, she reacted very positively.

Now fully recovered from January's knee replacement surgery in January, Liza says she "should be back on the boards soon." Will she commmit to a Broadway show? "It would have to be a really good script," she says. "And there would have to be wonderful people because, you know, doing a show is like living with a family and you gotta love them."

There are no definite plans for work at the moment. Although it's been rumored that a film of the TV series Arrested Development,on which she played a recurring - and very funny - role will be made, she says, "I haven't heard anything about that."

So, for the moment, Liza says, "I just know I want to keep working with Ron Lewis. And, right now, I'm thinking about that Emmy."

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