By Harry Haun
04 Dec 2008

A "small reception" held in the bowels of the Palace after the show went unreported in the press — till now. No newsfolk were allowed, so I went disguised as a fan. It was easy to blend in. They weren't kidding about "small reception" — a modest platoon of waiters dispensing finger food and splashes of champagne. But the basement was the place to be — it was wall-to-wall starlight. As subterranean gatherings goes, it was a pretty glittery group, humming "You Made Me Love You" or variations thereof, while The Great Lady repaired and received a small trickle of celebs and intimates.

	Michele Lee and Sandra Bernhard, Cheyenne Jackson, Tommy Tune, Alan Cumming, Mario Cantone, Julie Halston, Linda Lavin, Terrence McNally and Rex Reed
	photos by Aubrey Reuben

Special people — on the order of Phyllis Newman, who trilled "This is what show business is about!" — made it to the inner sanctum of The Star Dressing Room. Newman's daughter, Amanda Green, was delirious with delight about what Minnelli had done with "If," a novelty ditty by Daddy Adolph and Betty Comden.

"She exceeded all the expectations that anybody might have had," opted Tony Danza. "I mean that. Y'know, you worry about Liza. That's just your natural thing to worry about her. Tonight there was no more worrying about her. Holy mackerel!"

Sandra Bernhard, who is more polite than she is given credit for (she says "thank you very much" to the attending caterers), confessed to a good time. "Actually," she qualified, "it was beyond good. I cried so hard at the end of the show. Liza's a real reflection of genuine artistry and somebody's who's just amazing year after year. She keeps coming back doing it better and better. That really inspires me. As a matter of fact, she has inspired me since I first started to want to be a performer."

Another cry-for-happy customer unashamed to admit it was Michele Lee: "I cried. Over and over again. I'm so happy for her. It was such a joy for me to see her so happy and so there. And they stood up after every song —c'mon, gimme a break.

"Liza's such an actress. It makes every moment in everything she sings that much more special. The Charles Aznavour song she did [a crossdresser's lament, "What Makes a Man a Man?"], as a little playlet, was an amazing piece of acting that was so poignant, and it was poignant obviously for Mr. Aznavour to write it to start with."

The acting chops were duly noted by James Lipton, who has had Minnelli on "Inside the Actors Studio." Said he: "She reads a lyric like nobody else I know. Great actress!"

Tommy Tune, above it all as ever, posed with Lipton for photographers at intermission and implored him to "Stand tall!" Later, The Long-Stemmed One from Wichita Falls, TX posed for amateur photographers at the party with the show's music supervisor from Sweetwater, TX — pianist and conductor Billy Stritch.

"I had a spectacular time," Tune happily conceded. "She was better — better than ever — and she makes me feel better than ever, you know what I mean? It makes me feel so good because we're so happy for her. What a great show! And Ron Lewis did a terrific job directing the whole thing. I just met him, and I've admired his work through the years, since the '50s in Vegas. I was really so happy to meet him."

Stritch, in addition to pretty much running the whole shebang, shares credit for vocal arrangements with Kay Thompson's originals. "I deciphered them," he explained. "The whole point is to honor the lady. Not enough people know about her."

Lyricist David Zippel is credited with writing "additional material" for the show, but in person he modestly minimized his contribution. "I just kinda helped shape things a little bit," he proffered. "It's really Liza. She's a funny lady, and she was very easy to work with. I felt so appreciated and so very honored to be a part of this. I saw it when they were first putting it together, and I loved the numbers so much that I guess they sensed that and asked me if I would come along for the ride."

If you just know Jim Caruso as a weekly Birdland impresario, you will realize from his aggressive song-and-dance overdrive here that he has been painting with only a partial palette. "Nobody has ever asked me to do this before," he shrugged blissfully.

Prior to Broadway, the show put in a week in Woonsocket, RI, he said. "We went from Milan to Woonsocket. This was out of town. We've been out of town for two years. Audiences were wonderful, like tonight, standing after every number. When the Palace medley started, they'd applaud, and you think, 'Why would they know that?'"

Another of the Williams brothers, Cortes Alexander, toured with Minnelli for four years a decade ago. "This is crazy the way this show happened for me," he said. "I was driving across Santa Monica Boulevard in California, and I saw this huge Rolls Royce — my hand to God — coming toward me. It was Liza. I did a U-turn right in the middle and honked my horn. She almost had a heart attack right in the middle of Beverly Hills. We parked our cars in a parking garage on Rodeo Drive, walked up and down Rodeo Drive and caught up. The next week it was in the Enquirer that I was Husband No. Five. She said, 'I want to do this new show with Kay's material.' I knew all the songs because we used to sing them in her apartment. And she said, 'Are you up for that?' — I love this part — she said, 'We'll stand in a blue light in suits and sit on stools around the piano and sing, and that's the show.' I was, like, 'That's my kind of show — sitting down for two hours. I'm in for that.' Then in came Ron, who saw we knew left from right, kind of, and now we're just like dancing fools.'"

The hard-driving dancing, said Tiger Martina, the Andy Williams facsimile, was not re-created from old kinoscopes. There aren't any. "We haven't seen anything but the photographs of the act. Ron re-created a little bit of a language out of those photos."

Among the Thompson numbers that went by the wayside en route to Broadway were "That Old Feeling" and "Just One of Those Things," he said. "'Louisiana Purchase,' we learned musically early on, but it never went into the show. And then the only other one we had out on the table, just for a second, was 'Suzette.'"

Johnny Rodgers, who plays Bob Williams, has never met his real-life counterpart but did meet two of his brothers when the show played the Hollywood Bowl. He has also logged up four years on a Minnelli tour — plus he penned with actor Brian Lane Green (a Tony nominee for 1989's Starmites) the second song in, "I Would Never Leave You," a gorgeous ballad (melody by Stritch) that Minnelli sings about the audience.

Minnelli left the building upright, unaided and not requiring stretcher-bearers, which was all the more remarkable after That Performance. She emerged, circulated a smidgen and then gracefully glad-handed her way through the respectful throng to the exit, pausing only to chat with Rex Reed, whose words widened her wide eyes.

I asked Reed what had transpired, and he told me: "Well, she was pleased with what I had to say about her. She said, 'I'm calling you tomorrow. I want to put on tape what you said to me.' It's all the history at the Palace that came before my time. It's Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor. It's the history that I missed. You see it when she walks on stage, and the light hits her. It doesn't matter what she has been through, how many lives she has led — when that light hits her, she remembers everything. The bottom line is that she had never forgotten how to entertain."

And entertain she did — in spades — signing off both acts with classic Kander-&-Ebb that are her signature songs: the title tune from her Oscar winner, "Cabaret," and the Golden Globe-nominated song from "New York, New York." Before the latter, she did a shout-out to John Kander, who, "with these few notes, made a city stand up again."

There are few things better than sitting in the audience of the Palace Theatre hearing Liza Minnelli beckoning "C'mon, come through New York." Needless to say, we didn't sit long. Every man-jack of us was standing for the dizzying round of solo bows. Then, she brought on the four Williams bros and eventually — unheard of! — the entire 12-piece orchestra. As Joel Grey said in Cabaret, even the orchestra was beautiful.

And still it wasn't enough for the hungry audience so she brought out Stritch again and they improvised a period-paragraph closing — a song Minnelli said was very much in her heart this evening. She wished us all a merry little Christmas.

That brought her a mother-lode of love, to be sure. Big Momma's House rocked.

The curtain call at opening night of Liza's at the Palace...
photo by Aubrey Reuben

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