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Liza’s ’72 spectacular restored for Showtime

It’s a curious thing: When discussing her TV special, “Liza with a ‘Z”’ (which, above all, spotlights Liza Minnelli) the woman in the title keeps steering the talk to other names.Like Bob Fosse, the legendary Broadway and Hollywood director-choreographer who crafted her show.“I think it’s a Fosse gem,” Minnelli says. “I’m proud to be a part of that work.”“Liza with a ‘Z��
/ Source: The Associated Press

It’s a curious thing: When discussing her TV special, “Liza with a ‘Z”’ (which, above all, spotlights Liza Minnelli) the woman in the title keeps steering the talk to other names.

Like Bob Fosse, the legendary Broadway and Hollywood director-choreographer who crafted her show.

“I think it’s a Fosse gem,” Minnelli says. “I’m proud to be a part of that work.”

“Liza with a ‘Z”’ feasts on Liza in concert at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater the night of May 31, 1972, captured with eight 16mm cameras documentary-style without missing a beat. It premiered on NBC that September, making a splash and winning a Peabody Award as well as four Emmys, then encored in March and September 1973.

It has not aired since, until — rescued from near ruin and fully restored frame by frame, with the sound remixed from mono to Dolby 5.1 stereo — it returns on Showtime Saturday at 8 p.m. EST (as part of a free preview weekend for non-Showtime cable subscribers).

“It never looked this good,” says Minnelli with gusto, certain that its mastermind, who died in 1987, would approve: “Fosse’s applauding from heaven!”

It’s been a long time since anybody needed to be told her name is Liza with a “z”.

But even in 1972, Liza — daughter of Judy Garland and her second husband, director Vincent Minnelli — was a show-biz veteran. She had starred in films including “The Sterile Cuckoo” and the Fosse-directed “Cabaret” (released earlier that year), for which she would win an Oscar. And at 19, she had won a Tony for the Broadway musical “Flora the Red Menace.”

Then on “Liza with a ‘Z’,” Liza sealed the deal for a mass TV audience, triumphantly.

“All of the confidence I have when I walk out is because I’m surrounded with people who really think I’m the best there is, and showed me how to be better,” explains Minnelli (who turned 60 last month) during a recent interview in Manhattan. “It was the people who were with me. I felt safe and secure.”

She calls “Liza with a ‘Z”’ part of an ongoing collaboration between herself and Fosse as well as the songwriting team Fred Ebb and John Kander (who wrote special music for that program but whose other stellar output includes “New York, New York,” the Martin Scorsese-directed film in which Minnelli costarred with Robert De Niro, and “Cabaret”).

During the hour, Minnelli serves up a varied menu including “God Bless the Child,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” “My Mammy,” “Bye, Bye Blackbird” and, of course, a “Cabaret” medley.

For the sassy, now-forgotten Joe Tex hit “I Gotcha,” she vamps in a red sequined mini that must have had the network censor seeing red.

“You like my legs?” Minnelli chortles, her laughter a clue that the cigarette she’s holding isn’t the day’s first. “But you never see what you don’t want to,” she says, referring to the teasing camera angles. Somehow, at just the right moment, it cuts away.

“That was just like Fosse,” she goes on, full of praise for the jazz-dance genius. “He was a tease. And he was a flirt. I would watch his face to learn his choreography. His face told me more than his body movement. The body movement just lets you imitate what somebody does. The face tells you why.”

With their film “Cabaret” and their TV special, 1972 was a flashpoint in both their careers.

Since then, Minnelli has had her seismic ups and downs while logging four marriages, four divorces and lots of tabloid headlines. Meanwhile, she has had more than her share of physical ailments.

“I’ve got two false hips, a wired-up knee, scoliosis, which I’ve always had, and three crushed disks,” she announces defiantly. “But I feel great. I dance every day — a 2 1/2-hour class every morning.”

As a dancer (like anything informed by accumulating years) you discover how to do it more efficiently, she notes; how to be more compact with your movements.

“You learn to get older, you learn to use” — whereupon she interrupts herself to burst into song: “You gotta use what you got, to get what you want, before what you got is gone!” And roars with laughter.

“It’s one’s own responsibility to stay well as far as optimism goes,” she says, “and to learn from experience: ‘Holy Christ! I never want to get to HERE again!’ And then you figure out how not to. Besides, my mother taught me: If something that happened to you really bothers you, rewrite it. It’s your memory, rewrite it! You’re allowed!”

Her recurring role on the Fox comedy “Arrested Development” — as a randy socialite with a vertiginous tendency to take thudding pratfalls — demonstrated Liza may take her art seriously, but not so much herself.

And despite her colorful and often glorious past, she insists she’s plenty satisfied to live in the present — and the future.

She says she seldom screens her films.

“I don’t think I’ve looked at ‘Cabaret’ in years — and never alone. I would never sit alone and look at my own stuff.” She chuckles. “I don’t know, maybe I was frightened by ’Sunset Boulevard’ as a child.”

Never fear. Liza is no Norma Desmond.

“I just can’t groove on myself. I can’t do it. I groove on other people. So when I see ‘Liza with a ‘Z”’ — which indeed she has watched, with relish — “I see Fosse. And I see the dancers. And I see Fred (who died in 2004), in every word I speak.”

After all, the show captures forever a long-ago evening, along with the spirit of geniuses passed on. But celebrating it now, Liza Minnelli is very much alive.