Liza Minnelli sang confessions with one night at SF Symphony and new CD

Liza Minnelli with her Broadway star presence played one memorable sequined night at San Francisco Symphony last night to a full house and she has some confessions to make. Confessions would be her new CD with cabaret pianist and composer Billy Strich. Confessions would be a theme of the evening spiked with some spunky, fun loving story telling of Broadway and Hollywood and family, torch song singing and balladeering. The night came complete with arm waving interjections from her adoring fans with frequent declarations of love from the first row to the upper tier. No intermission.

Liza emerged at eight wearing a black sequined top and long red scarf and black pants with black shoes. The elegant band wore white jackets and Liza would later introduce each as her babies, musicians who had been with her most of her life. Conductor Billy Stritch on piano, Rick Cutler on drums; Chip Jackson on bass; Ross Konikoff, Dave Trigg and Chuck Wilson on trumpets. The program would be announced from the stage.

Liza kicked off with a rousing invitation to come on along with Alexander’s ragtime band. Fans reached into the air and waved their arms and screamed. She kept up the energy with Swanie River. She held the mic in her hand and moved about even turning to the ring of fans seated behind and above the stage. She seemed so ebullient and in the moment and caught up in the excitement of the night, responding to the cries of “I love you” by calling back “I love you too” in her breathy, sultry, earthy voice. I’m so excited up here I can’t see straight.”

Warming up, she removed the long red scarf from her neck and sipped from a mug on the piano. More screaming. “This is my favorite sight in the whole world—I wish you could see how you look.”

She slowed the tempo only briefly for the next number then asked, “Did you see the movie Chicago? About three thousand years ago it was a musical on Broadway . . .Chita Rivera. The woman who played Roxie got something in her throat. Liza said she was in L.A. at the time and was told “the show was going to close. We’re screwed.”

Liza told the audience she said then “I’ll do it.”

“No” he responded. “No star ever goes in for another star, the understudy does it.”

He relented and said to Liza, “you have to ask Fossi”.

Liza continues. “So I call up Bobbie and he says, “I don’t know Lize. There’s going to be a lot of hoopla.

Liza says, “What if we don’t tell anybody. Just have the lights go down and then announce that Gwen is out and Roxie Hart will be played by Liza Minelli.”

“But wait!” Liza says melodramatically to the audience. She needed to explain the plot of the movie, she said, to introduce the song she was about to sing.

“At that point no woman had ever been put to death. All were acquitted and they went into show business. But the woman before Roxie gets sentenced was suddenly sentenced to hang.”

Liza acted flabbergasted. “So, Roxie had to think of something.”

Liza turns her back to the audience after murmering “think, think . . . Shit!”

For the next song Liza moves into the show Cabaret.

She goes on to say how she likes singing songs in character. This song was not in the movie but was in the show. “The year—1929. The place—Berlin. A cold, snowy New York evening. A young man gets off a train. He sees a place for rent . . .”

Liza pulls up a director’s chair and takes a seat. More yelling, “We love you.”

“Thank you for coming.”

A couple of times I noticed Travis Rew, sitting next to me on the end of the row, tapping one foot or the other as Liza sang.

So she turns to her pianist Billy. “Okay, cookie, hit it!” She sings Cabaret.

She shimmies and shakes her shoulders, struts and strikes poses, she escalates into the Elsie part about too many pills and liquor killing her . . . there’s a long pause and then the audience gives Liza a standing ovation during the um, interlude. She pretends to be out of breath. “You still got it” calls out a fan.

“What?”

“You’re beautiful!”

“What? . . . Thanks.” Audience yelling.

She tells her pianist to play something after pretending to be out of breath. So he does, a wonderful cabaret song about there being no moon at all, it’s so dark even Fido is afraid to bark, what a night to park. He begins scatting, old time. Man, what a class act.

Liza says to him, “Billy, you can sing man.”

“So can you.”

“Because of you” she answers.

She announces their new album, their collaboration called “Confessions”.

She starts with a droll cabaret number about never having kissed a man before . . . knowing his name . . . and how she always goes to bed by ten . . . then goes home at four.

She sings a love song about being fascinated then a song she sang for Bill, saying she chose it because it’s how she felt about him.

The song she said was in a movie her father directed. She was seventeen. “I felt it, I felt it, I felt it.”

“I remember every guy I sing about.”

“I ain’t gonna tell you” she says to the audience. “I ain’t one of those dames, I just live in my own head . . . “

Liza went on to sing one of the more charming, whimsical and novel songs of the night, something from Lady & the Tramp, the cartoon as she called it.

There’s a Pekanese, a great big Pekanese. The song was written and sung by Peggy Lee. So Liza begins to sing, “He’s a tramp and I love him . . . He’s a rogue . . ..”

Next she sang her Godmother Kate Thompson’s torch song after which she began tearing up as she introduced her musicians . . . saying “Oh my juicy God.”

For her next song she sang a soul-renewing “sometimes . . . you lose every penny but the world goes round.” Standing ovation.

Next she’s back in Hollywood and says, “everybody called everybody aunt and uncle.”

She says, “Uncle Frank called. He wanted to record New York New York. The song was being ignored. I was happy.”

After this finale she re-entered the stage and pretended to snap pictures of the audience. “What a Christmas present! What a Christmas present!”

Then she said spontaneously to the audience, I just saw the cutest thing”. She picked up a little girl from the audience dressed as a flapper, with a shiny top and bright green feather sticking up from her forehead.

“Can you get up on my lap?” she asked the little girl.

Billy helped.

Liza began another anecdote in a story telling tone. “When my mother met my father they were doing a movie, ‘Meet Me in St. Louis.”

“That’s the reason I’m here and so it’s the reason you are dressed like this and why you are here.”

About ready to sing her encore, Liza says to the little girl, “Don’t be nervous.”

She sang “Have yourself a merry little Christmas” as the twinkle lights glowed in the dark around the stage and formed a garland and wreath.

For more information: www.SFSymphony.com

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