"It's a sequin-covered showbiz version of the Easter story," raved the MC for the night, Graham Norton. "Liza's back!" Liza Minnelli's quiet wedding to concert promoter David Gest was less than a month ago, but she is already back on the road, playing a week of shows in the city where she was nearly mugged on honeymoon.
Lashings of this sort of pluckiness, a key element of her repertoire, were in evidence last night. Defying both the thugs who tried to steal her necklace and rumours of nodules on the vocal cords, she twinkled in a black basque and diamonds, and sang blisteringly.
Her voice emanates from a body that seems too small to house it, which attached a touching aspect to her performance. But while she inherited the body, voice and diva gene from her mother, there's not so much of the vulnerability.
Accordingly, you go to a Liza Minnelli show not to watch her fall apart - though she was pretty winded after a pretend-hiphop version of Liza With A Z - but to wallow in a Broadway-bred brassiness that barely exists any more.
The audience shared her larger-than-life style - don't underestimate the appeal of a gig where even the fans dress as if the OK! photographer is waiting in the wings.
Minnelli would undoubtedly bridle at being called dated. She introduced herself with "I'm happy and healthy and ready to rock", the inference being that she's youthful enough to comprehend hiphop, R&B and other recentish musical developments.
She even made a bid for cred with a cover of Mary J Blige's Family Affair that was surprisingly true to the original, if you didn't count the eight dancers dressed in dirty denim. Everyone knows the dancers at R&B gigs are generally more glamorous than the stars.
A collective wriggle of relief, then, when she got on with belting out show tunes and jazz standards. The basque was succeeded by a negligee and a cigarette for Don't Smoke in Bed, and a sequinned red minidress during What Did I Have, the latter dedicated to "my mentor Barbra Streisand. Go, Baba!"
She revealed she met her husband while rehearsing the song Never Never Land, which she sang for us. Beltingly, of course. Liza's back, and she's still one of a kind.
