LIZA’S CARNEGIE BOW: HER ‘GREATEST NIGHT’

The most electrifying opening night of the musical season here took place not on Broadway but at Carnegie Hall, where Liza Minnelli opened a three-week concert engagement. The glittery event, attended by a Who’s Who of the Broadway musical theater, brightened a lackluster season and once again lit up Minnelli’s career.

“It’s the greatest night of my life. . . . You work your whole life for a night like this,” said a euphoric Minnelli at a star-studded party after her performance Thursday.

Written and directed by Fred Ebb, with musical arrangements by Marvin Hamlisch, the Carnegie Hall concert marks the first time that Minnelli has performed in New York since 1979, and one of her first major public performances since a much-publicized battle with drugs and alcohol. The engagement also will be the longest-running a solo performance in the history of the legendary auditorium.

From the moment she walked on stage to a standing ovation from the elegantly attired, capacity audience at the four-tiered, 2,600-seat hall, it was clear she had returned triumphantly. Interrupted twice more by standing ovations before receiving a thunderous, sustained ovation at the conclusion of the two-hour concert, Minnelli seemed genuinely surprised and moved by the response from the famous friends and paying public who filled the sedate hall.

“I was genuinely frightened,” she said at the festive party held at Broadway’s Marriott Marquis Hotel. “But it was great . . . fantastic. . . . It was thrilling the last time (in 1979), but it’s more thrilling now.”

Minnelli made much of her recent troubles and of her recovery throughout the upbeat program. “You have read a lot about me in the last couple of years, and most of it’s true, but things do change,” she said at the outset, before singing “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Costumed by Halston and looking slim and radiant, Minnelli chose songs that reflected her 23-year career in show business and her current outlook. She also spoke at length about her late father, director Vincente Minnelli, and, in passing, about her late mother, Judy Garland.

Among the famous faces in the audience were Minnelli’s sister, Lorna Luft; both her former husbands, Peter Allen and Jack Haley Jr., and her husband of the last seven years, Mark Gero.

In one of the most pointed and poignant references of the evening, Minnelli altered the lyrics of one of her signature songs, “Cabaret,” from: “I made my mind up back in Chelsea, when I go I’m going like Elsie,” to “. . . I’m not going like Elsie,” referring to a woman who has died “happy” of “too much pills and liquor.”

The opinion commonly expressed at the opening-night party by such Broadway veterans as Jule Styne, Burton Lane and Bob Fosse was that Minnelli was in top form, singing and moving more beautifully than ever. Said Fosse, her director for the film version of “Cabaret”: “She’s grown up.”

The one frequently expressed sour note on the evening was that the amplification in Carnegie Hall often caused the 46-piece orchestra to drown out the performer. But this flaw failed to dampen the excitement or dim the brilliance of the evening.