Liza Minnelli tour blasts off at the
Opera House

By Claire Harvey
The Sunday Telegraph
Sunday 18 October 2009

There are not many women in the world who could stride onto the Sydney Opera House stage wearing a white lame pantsuit, sing a song about the spelling of her own name and blast a crowd of squealing, screaming, adult men into the stratosphere.

Actually, there's only one woman who could do it.

It's Liza - with a Z - Minnelli and she has crowned herself queen of all the queens over two nights of sold-out shows, in which the crowd's enthusiasm was matched only by her own energy.

"I love you, Liza!'' bellowed a baritone voice from the crowd early in Friday night's show, just one of many manly swoons from hordes of fashionable young gay men, many wearing bow-ties or sparkly shoes, with a few middle-aged straight couples thrown in.

And Liza returned the love, with a series of show tunes, Vegas standards and her own greatest hits - including Liza With A Z and Cabaret, the theme from her 1972 film - delivered with all the sauciness of the original.

Nowadays, Minnelli shimmies in her chair, rather than doing the splits on top of it, and her diction is sometimes a little garbled, but she still delivers a compelling exhortation to embrace the world - life is a cabaret, old chum.

"Thank you, my friends, my family - wow!'' she said, during one of many ovations.

"Wow, the Sydney Opera House! I can't believe it. If any of you ever saw me before, you'll remember I used to sit down in the second act. Now I sit down in the first act,'' she said, dragging her chair to centre stage.

That was the extent of Liza's Sydney-specific banter - the show is a continuation of her Tony Award-winning run at New York's Palace Theatre and, at 63, Minnelli isn'tup for major change.

The show's 14 numbers included a smoky version of Every Time We Say Goodbye, a showstopping New York, New York and a breathy My Own Best Friend from the musical Chicago.

There's a reason Minnelli is such a gay icon: her empathy for the political struggles of homosexual people rings through in songs like What Makes A Man A Man, by Charles Aznavour, underlaid by a smooth clarinet from her fault-free orchestra of 12.

For her encore, Minnelli returned in baggy T-shirt, slippers and a towel, scrubbed her face of make-up and delivered All The Lives Of Me, a song by her ex-husband Peter Allen. "Thank you, Peter,'' she said, and slithered off in her slippers, a hoofer to the last.