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Liza's dramatic incarnation of the antic, available Sally is a nice mixture of naturalness and calculation, too innocent to be immoral and too knowing to be truly amoral. But even with her fingernails lacquered green and her huge Bambi eyes circled with
eyeshadow, she is too contemporary and American to be fully convincing as the "divinely decadent" Sally of 1930s Berlin.
The real glory of Liza's performance in Cabaret is that it allows her for the first time in movies to do what she does best: a cabaret act. She is one of the finest nightclub performers in the world. On the ever-shrinking circuit of high-class spots, she is one of the few headliners who can still pack a club. Las Vegas' Riviera pays her $60,000 a week, which puts her near the ceiling. The French, those connoisseurs of cabaret, christened Liza la petite Piaf americaine after her triumphant stand last year at Paris' Olympia music hall. "She has that personal magnetism," says Joel Grey, her co-star in Cabaret. "She is capable of making you care about her, making you want to protect her —and then you realize that she's perfectly capable of protecting herself."
Slow Simmering. In the act that Liza has been doing for the past two years—most recently at Miami Beach's Eden Roc Hotel last month—she makes her first entrance dressed in a rust silk tube with a revealing slit from ankle to thigh. With not a word to introduce herself, she trills: "If you could read my mind, my love," and builds the song to a climax, afterward melting slowly into a simmering "la, la, la, la, la." Then, her whole body gyrating, she snatches the mike off the stand, crooks one leg, and throws back her head, as if the melody were surging up from her toes. The effect is at once sexy and dramatic. Anybody in the audience who had not previously dropped his fork—or his conversation —does so by the last "la, la, la."
To make the point that her name is Ligh-za. with a z and not Leesa with an s, she goes into a specially written, funny tongue twister that might stop even Danny Kaye. Next she dashes offstage, emerging a minute later in an Indian-maiden costume. Behind her on a rolling platform comes the American Sunshine, a rock foursome from Houston that accompanies her everywhere. Her vocal change from blues to rock is as smooth as her costume change, and the heavy beat seems to propel her around the stage, twisting and kicking. By the time she slithers across the piano, she is awash in perspiration, and her false eyelashes, which might double as Madame Butterfly's fans, are falling off. "It's so hot up here," she says as she yanks the lashes off, "that I have hair in my eyeballs. It's one thing to be glamorous, but when you go blind . . ."
After another costume change, she reappears in a black velvet knickers suit with a black bowler, a costume strongly—and deliberately—reminiscent of her mother's black tights, black jacket and high hat. She swings into the old Jolson favorite, My Mammy —as close as a song can get to Judy's standard, Swanee. As Liza gathers momentum, she manages to ride to a socking finale that is at the same time suffused with nostalgia.