by MATTHEW HAYS

Looking into Liza Minnelli’s face, it’s impossible not to be struck by her lineage. You can see the strains of her legendary parents, director Vincente Minnelli and singer-actor Judy Garland. That being said, you also see the distinctive Liza, a performer with her own unique ability to capture an audience’s imagination.

After an astonishing string of successes in her 20s, things got decidedly rougher for Minnelli, who has struggled with substance abuse and a string of unsuccessful marriages. Now, Minnelli attends regular AA meetings, practises with a dance choreographer daily, and has given up on finding another husband.

The past year has also seen something of a renaissance for Lizaphiles. Her landmark 1972 TV special Liza With a ‘Z’ was brought out of the vault, restored and had a big-screen premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. In March, but one day after her 60th birthday, the special was screened at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, with all proceeds going to AIDS charities. A spring release of the DVD followed, a set that includes the best-selling original-soundtrack CD. (The DVD includes a never-before-seen sequence of Minnelli performing “Mein Herr” live.)

Watching Liza With a ‘Z’, it’s impossible not to be awestruck at the woman’s sheer talent. In the hour-long special, shot in one night at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, Minnelli belts her way through a series of numbers, while executing the hallucinogenic choreography of Bob Fosse. The two were on a roll. They were then basking in the glow of the success of Cabaret, the landmark musical film that would win Minnelli and Fosse Oscars. Liza With a ‘Z’ won critical raves and was considered a breakthrough in the evolution of concert films. It won Minnelli an Emmy the following year, during awards season—the same year she would win an Oscar for Cabaret—making her one of the few performers in history to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy and a Golden Globe.

As much as Minnelli enjoys looking back, she’s also looking forward: she’s currently developing a new feature musical with Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the Oscar-winning producing team behind Chicago.

Meeting Minnelli is a trip, to say the least. She is immediately warm and charming. She looks much younger than her 60 years. Though she’s kicked the alcohol habit, she still enjoys the occasional American cigarette. And Minnelli constantly acknowledges her gay fans, saying she wouldn’t be where she is today without them. She certainly knows how to work the press—as I walk in the door to meet her, she asks, “Who’s this handsome man they’ve sent to interview me?” I gasp. She giggles. We sit down to talk.

Mirror: What runs through you when you watch the Liza With a ‘Z’ special now?

Liza Minnelli: Just how lucky I am and how much fun it was. I’m glad that I’m looking at it now, and not when I’m 70 or 80, when I can’t do it. Because now when I watch it, I think, ‘Yeah, I can still do that. Hey, how can we do that better?’ I feel exactly the way I did when I was doing it. I miss what I was doing then. I’m a director’s daughter, and I’ve missed having a team around me. Now I feel like I have that team again and I feel so lucky.

M: It’s become the stuff of legend now. Did you get a sense of that while you were making it?

LM: There had been talk of me doing a TV special, but usually they did it on video and you were usually teamed with someone else. So Fosse said, “We should do this. But we have to do it our way.” Fosse wanted to do it the way it had never been done before—one concert, one night only, eight cameras. No retakes. We were really taking a chance, we didn’t know how people would respond and we didn’t know what we had. At the end of the night, I said, “Was I alright?” And Fosse replied, “Yeah, I think so.” The next day, I watched some of the footage and was still a bit confused. I hit the road—as usual, I was touring. Then Fosse began to edit. And he called me a few days later and said, “This is the best thing you’ve ever done. You’ve never been better.”

The Fosse formula

M: What set Bob Fosse aside as a choreographer and director?

LM: He was such an original. He understood the human body and he understood the human emotions that go along with the body, why people move the way they do. Nowadays, when you look at a music video, it has a lot of editing, but you don’t see the dance. He had the same amount of edits, but you see the dance.

M: You and Fosse obviously had something going on—a real chemistry.

LM: He was incredible. The last shot at the end of Cabaret, when I’m under the bridge, and I scream, if I’d done that at the beginning of the shoot, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Bob taught me how to do that by the end of the shoot.

M: When you look at hip hop dancing now, and look back at the dancing you were doing then, what’s the biggest difference that you see?

LM: Dancing now, the movement is obvious. It’s like fucking. What Fosse did was foreplay. He loved to tease. I’m actually a very shy person. Fosse taught me to be sexy. Looking back at the special, I often think, “Shit, I was sexy!”

Spears and stories

M: What do you think when you watch a Britney Spears video?

LM: I’m technically such a director’s daughter. I look at the shots, I look at the edits, and I get angry when they don’t complete a movement. Why have they changed clothes so many times? And I don’t know what she’s singing about. What is the story of the song? The movement can be fabulous, but where’s the story?

M: Musicals have managed to break through a bit again, after a long absence. Do you think they can ever come back as strong as they once were?

LM: It has to be good—it has to be a good movie. You look at Gigi, that’s a great movie. When my father made Meet Me in St. Louis, they said to him, “You can’t make this, people don’t sing in real life, they don’t sing in the street.” He said, “Of course they do!” If you asked him what that movie was about, he’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, a family.” How can you describe what that film was about? It’s too big an emotion to put into words. I believe there is a way to get musicals back again. There’s music in everyone’s life. Music is part of our emotional dialogue. I think there’s a way to take that and make a movie out of it.

M: You’ve been in the tabloids so much in recent years. What was the story about you that was the most ridiculous, the story that most approached sci-fi?

LM: You know what? My mother gave me great advice. She said, “They’re going to write what they’re going to write. And there’s nothing you can do about it. So don’t read it and go eat a hamburger.” And that’s what I do. Because it’s silly.

M: Of course, I’ve got to ask the obligatory question: why so many gay fans?

LM: What can I say? You guys have got great taste.

Liza Minnelli will perform as part of the closing ceremonies of the Outgames at the Olympic Stadium on Saturday, Aug. 5, 4 p.m. For info, go to www.montreal2006.org

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