Songs in a family album

Lorna Luft is studying herself in the mirror. The hair, a carefully casual pouf of blond, is definitely working, and the rest is coming along.

Luft’s body is draped in a floor-length chiffon gown of the sweetest pale aqua. The dress is sprinkled with crystals, and the combination glows against sun-baked shoulders the color of chestnuts.

Shoulders only a dermatologist could hate.

“He screams at me,” Luft is saying. “The other day he said, ‘Why don’t you put an egg on your chest?’ Then he threw the sunscreen at me.” Luft erupts into a howl. She laughs big, like someone who has spent her life excavating sound from her lower depths. She has, of course, during a 35-year career singing and acting in musicals like the national tour of “Guys and Dolls” and the movie “Grease 2,” following the sometimes treacherous path of her legendary mother, Judy Garland, who died of a drug overdose in 1969 at age 47. Along the way Luft has morphed from innocent to caretaker to a vortex of self-destructiveness to survivor, and now she’s hitting cruise control: At age 50, the earthy Luft is confident she has become her own woman and not just someone comfortable enough in her own skin to ignore her dermatologist.

After decades spent denying the family legacy, Luft is finally enough of her own person that she can be Judy Garland’s daughter too. And she’s celebrating what her friends call her “liberation” along with her mother’s legacy in “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” her one-woman show of music and memories that opens today at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Ergo, the dress. ABS custom-designed it for the first fully staged theatrical production of Luft’s tribute to her mother. Set against rare film footage and vintage photographs, Luft reminisces and sings such Garland standards as “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “For Me and My Gal” and “You Made Me Love You.”

A recent run at Feinstein’s at the Cinegrill had critics cheering. Don Heckman wrote in The Times that Luft’s “fast-paced performance exploded in a compelling blend of musical excitement and poignant remembrance.”

The show sprang from Luft’s 1998 bestseller, “Me and My Shadows,” which was made into an ABC miniseries starring Judy Davis as Garland. But “Songs” has something special -- it marks Luft’s debut singing Garland’s repertoire. Before she began performing the show in cabarets and on symphony stages around North America four years ago, Garland’s younger daughter had never sung her mother’s music in public.

“If you decide to go into a business that your parents were in, you have to understand you’re not going to walk in there by yourself,” Luft says. “Your parent is going to walk in there before you do. I always knew that, but there’s a fear. You say to yourself, ‘I want to make it on my own.’ You don’t want to look like you’re cashing in. I didn’t want to deal with the fact that I always had that shadow. So you run away.”

After Luft lost her mother at 16, she dyed her hair purple and became a rock ‘n’ roller posted to Studio 54, where she spent way too many nights and, as she once told Howard Stern, “snorted all of Peru.”

None of it changed who she was. In the show she tells the story of one of her early gigs as a 19-year-old, fresh from her Broadway debut in “Promises, Promises.” Her agent had booked her in Atlantic City, N.J., and when she got there, she realized it was a show for kids starring six chimpanzees in gold lame tuxedos and Wanda the diving horse. Luft followed the horse.

“The emcee said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Judy’s daughter, Liza’s little sister, Erna Lust.’ And you wonder why I ran away from all of this. But finally you have to sit down and say you’re never going to outrun it. It’s always going to be there, so either get out of the business or make friends with the shadow. And that’s what I did.

“But it took me a long time. It took Natalie Cole a long time. It’s taken Lisa Marie Presley a long time because we are children of legends. Not stars. Legends. It’s different.”

A family figure

Luft is flying down the 101 in her cream-colored Lexus SUV after her fitting at the downtown offices of ABS. She’s heading for Calabasas, where she’ll appear in her starring role as Mom. That’s where her first husband and former manager Jake Hooker lives, and where their 12-year-old daughter, Vanessa, goes to school. (Luft shares equal custody of Vanessa and 19-year-old Jesse with Hooker and lives in Beverly Hills with her second husband and musical director, Colin Freeman, a new kitty and two Dalmatians, Steinway and Arson.)

Vanessa has “the voice,” Luft says, but at the moment, she’d rather use it to yell at her mom.

“You’re late,” Vanessa says with mock rage, pointing at her watch, as Luft pulls the SUV into the school’s driveway.

“There’s been a great big ol’ accident on the freeway,” Luft replies.

She’s adamant about providing a “normal” life for her children. Normal means not Hollywood. It also means public school.

“My son went to a private school first, and it became a very star, star school. One day he called me and said he was going on a private jet to Vegas with one of his friends and his dad. And I said, ‘No, I don’t think that will be happening.’ He was in the fourth grade.”

Luft says motherhood brought her back to earth after her chaotic youth, and writing her book helped her work through her demons. So that when her book became a bestseller, she felt steady enough to finally sing her mother’s songs. She decided to start working on the show even before the miniseries deal was made.

“They were comparing me to her anyway, which was really funny,” Luft says. “I wasn’t singing her songs and they were still saying, ‘You sound exactly like her.’ That was their wanting me to sound like her. Listen, I could come out with green hair and they’d say, ‘You look exactly like her.’ ”

Luft told old friend Barry Manilow about her plans. He replied, “It’s about time,” and sent her to Ken and Mitzi Welch, who’ve written shows for Manilow and Carol Burnett. For six months, the Welches would sit down with Luft and a tape recorder and ask her about her life. Then they’d return with pastiches of music and storytelling coordinated with film and TV clips.

The story, Luft says, is about family, about being a daughter and a mother too. In one 17-minute medley called “Born in a Trunk or How Grandma Got to Carnegie Hall,” she answers her children’s questions about the grandmother they never knew. The segment was inspired by real life.

“The other day I was driving along and one of her songs came on the radio. ‘How old was Grandma when she did that?’ That’s their grandma they never got to know, but they see her movies. They’re Dorothy’s grandchildren.”

Luft also sings duets with her mother’s projected image, a technique Natalie Cole popularized in “Unforgettable,” her posthumous duet with her late father, Nat King Cole.

In one duet, Luft sings “Shining Star,” a new counter-melody, while her mother sings “Over the Rainbow.” Luft knows her audiences long to hear it, but she would never perform the song herself.

“Nobody should sing that song,” she says. “I don’t think that anybody understands it, does it justice, as well as my mom. It’s too much of a signature.”

Luft says her half-sister, Liza Minnelli, with whom she has sometimes had a rocky relationship, saw the show in the Hamptons and was kind and complimentary about her performance. Her father, producer Sid Luft, has not. They haven’t spoken since she decided to write the book.

“He felt I was taking away his property,” she says. “He said I stole his dream. He was supposed to write his book, make his movie, and he never did. How long are we going to wait? And it was my mother.”

Audiences’ comfort level

Luft pulls the car into a Beverly Hills parking lot across from Mulberry Street Pizza, where she’s feeding her daughter and meeting her producer, Susan Dietz. Dietz invited Luft to perform at the Canon after seeing her two-week run at Feinstein’s. The show is set to run for at least a month, so Dietz can prod it into shape for a possible New York production.

“This is an evolving thing,” Dietz says. “There will be a show we open with on opening night and then there will be a show we close with. It will grow and deepen.” Dietz wants Luft to punch up the dialogue to illuminate her inner journey as Garland’s daughter. “She’s still opening windows and doors. There are places she hasn’t revealed yet.”

Luft explains that while she’s comfortable with the whole, unvarnished truth, she’s not sure her audiences would be. “You never want to make an audience feel uncomfortable,” she says. “It wasn’t a happy ending. It was a whole journey, and that’s what the book does, but when you have two hours, you don’t want to make the audience go, ‘Oh my God.’ They go through enough emotion watching a daughter sing to her mother. You can’t just wring them out.”

That isn’t the point anyway. Luft says the show tries to carry the torch, to share Garland’s music with generations weaned on Britney and Whitney.

“I know I’m doing the right thing,” she says. “I’m not trying to be her. I’m celebrating the legacy of music she left to us all.”