O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Liza’s Fire Singes Link to Songs’ Emotions

It seems customary to begin Liza Minnelli reviews by likening her to a thunderbolt, locomotive or some other measure of exuberant energy.

So, OK, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Monday, Minnelli was a nuclear power plant, the Eveready rabbit, a white tornado and all that.

The still-mini-skirted 47-year-old singer remains an onstage dynamo who plows through tunes with remarkable technique and lung power and overwhelming bluster.

She epitomizes a passing era of show biz, when a star was a star and their doings were somehow expected to take place on a different plane from mere mortals. Even on the few numbers in her set Monday that could make some claim to intimacy, Minnelli’s every word and gesture seemed calculated to be larger than life. Even when she wiped the sweat from her brow and flung it away, it seemed rehearsed.

In that regard, her performance seems closest--in both assets and debits--to those of the late Sammy Davis Jr. Both were possessed of tremendous talents, seemingly born to be in the spotlight. But both also could send those gifts rocketing so fast and far into the stratosphere that they often weren’t able to carry much emotional cargo.

Minnelli’s performance was a compact, road-show version of a program she’s been working for a couple of years, captured on her album released last fall, “Stepping Out at Radio City.” She ranged over 18 songs, though several of those were delivered in truncated medley form.

Initially garbed in a glittering pearl-and-silver hued mini-dress and jacket, with a long white scarf around her neck, Minnelli, who continues through Sunday, took the stage and hit her first couple of numbers at full-tilt.

But both “Yes I Can” and “Blues in the Night” didn’t attain much loft, in large part because her 12-piece band seemed leaden, as if waking from a snooze. The latter tune was further marred by some decidedly un-soulful fuzzed-out blues licks from the band’s guitarist.

It wasn’t until the following medley of Stephen Sondheim’s “Old Friend” and “I Live Alone and I Like It” that she spoke to the audience, and then it was in the form of an acted-out story based around the lyric.

When she did get around to addressing the audience after the fourth song, it was more acting--formulaic patter that forged an awkward bridge between the set’s far-ranging material. The songs roughly fell into a section of songs about women, a song about men and a medley of John Kander-Fred Ebb tunes.

Maybe she takes more time to develop her song linkages in her longer shows, but there was one particularly muddled moment Monday, when her script lurched from musing on the sadness of songs about women to how perfect, courageous and compassionate women are, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe and Nancy Reagan, and then launched into Kander and Ebb’s weightless confection “Sarah Lee.” May we say, “Huh?”

Some of her vocals were scarcely more communicative. Where Frank Sinatra inhabits a lyric, Minnelli’s boisterous technique often seemed to drag the song along behind her, like it was merely a trailer hitched to her Ferrari.

So went “Some People,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” an overwrought take on Charles Aznavour’s “Sailor Boys” and much of the Kander and Ebb medley, with the exception of “Maybe This Time.”

That song, like the other standouts of the evening, resulted when she turned down the exuberance a bit, so she smoldered rather than consumed. Dipping into the lower register of her voice, she ably populated Lotte Lenya’s shoes in singing “So What” from the stage version of “Cabaret.”

Another standout was her version of k.d. lang’s sultry “Pulling Back the Reins.” While not matching lang’s rare pairing of emotional content and vocal fireworks, Minnelli still delivered her most human-scaled performance of the evening. She also excelled on the chancy selection of Aznavour’s “What Makes a Man a Man,” in which a lonely homosexual man muses on the rudiments of his gender.

She closed her performance, as might be expected, with “New York, New York,” first declaring, “This person with blue eyes keeps singing this sucker, but this song was written especially for me,” and then belting it out as only she can. Veteran comedian Corbett Monica opened the show with some good old-time ethnic humor.

* Liza Minnelli continues through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $35 to $50. (714) 556-2787.

* LIZA FETED

Angels of the Arts throw a posh party in the Center Room. E2