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Minnelli, Fosse shine in long-lost 'Liza' show
2006-03-13
Anyone with even a passing interest in Liza Minnelli or Bob Fosse will soon be thankful that producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron had dinner with Minnelli in Los Angeles around this time last year. As the trio broke bread at Orso, Minnelli dropped into the conversation the fact that she owned the rights to her famed September 1972 television concert special "Liza With a Z." The hourlong NBC program, filmed at Broadway's Lyceum Theater, was a monster hit in its day. It came just as Minnelli and the legendary choreographer-director-producer Fosse were riding high (and headed for Oscar wins) on the movie version of the surreal 1930s Berlin musical "Cabaret." John Kander and Fred Ebb, the songwriting team from "Cabaret," also reunited with them for "Liza." The soundtrack album from "Liza" has been a pop staple since its original release, but until last year the hourlong film hadn't been screened publicly in more than 30 years. It holds up as an example of Fosse at his most inventive, not to mention being a career-defining performance for Minnelli. By the time dessert arrived, Zadan, Meron and Minnelli had brainstormed plans to revive "Liza" with a heavily promoted pay TV special airing, a DVD release, a tour of selected film festivals and even a series of benefit screening events for AIDS-related charities. Showtime Networks entertainment president Robert Greenblatt gave an enthusiastic yes to all of it over his first dinner with Zadan, Meron and Minnelli not too many weeks later. Now "Liza" is set to premiere April 1 on Showtime, presented by Zadan and Meron, and be released April 4 as a Showtime-issued DVD with extras. The "Liza" revival campaign should help rehabilitate Minnelli's image as a tabloid punch line. The film offers ample evidence that in her prime she was a triple threat of considerable talent, as befitting the born-in-a-trunk daughter of Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli. (Zadan happened to attend the show and can be seen briefly in a crowd shot during the opening title sequence.) But even the star is edged out of the spotlight at times by Fosse's breathtaking vision. His dance numbers are positively psychedelic (it was 1972, after all), full of sexy, expressive gyrations that punctuate Minnelli's moves but also tell their own story with Fosse's signature theatricality and irreverence. Minnelli struts and shows off her range by moving easily through such standards as "God Bless the Child" and "My Mammy" to soulful renditions of "Son of a Preacher Man," "I Gotcha" and "Bye, Bye Blackbird" to a medley of tunes from "Cabaret." "When Fosse died (in 1987), a lot of people who loved his film work felt very sad because in his career he didn't do very many of them," Zadan says. "This is truly a lost Bob Fosse movie." Although Minnelli owned the special, she didn't exactly know where it was. After a long search for the original masters, it was lovingly reconstructed by noted film restorer Michael Arick, and the soundtrack was given a state-of-the-art Dolby Digital 5.1 buff-up. Although most music specials of the era were shot on video, Fosse insisted on using film. He planted eight 16mm cameras in various spots at the Lyceum, where "Liza" was shot in a single night, on May 31, 1972. "It was produced with very deep insight into the life of this performer," Meron says. "It's the right tribute to who Liza is. People need to focus on the talent, not the tabloid headlines." Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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