I didn’t want to derail the GYPSY/Bernadette Peters thread, so I started this one.
i think there was a window in which Liza could’ve been a great Mama Rose. She included “Some People” in her live concert appearances for years. With “Liza’s Back,” she performed “Rose’s Turn” successfully. Now, since that window has been long closed, I will always wonder about what might’ve been…
MichelleCraig said: "I didn’t want to derail the GYPSY/Bernadette Peters thread, so I started this one.
i think there was a window in which Liza could’ve been a great Mama Rose. She included “Some People” in her live concert appearances for years. With “Liza’s Back,” she performed “Rose’s Turn” successfully. Now, since that window has been long closed,I will always wonder about what might’ve been…
Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?"
No. Her persona was way too fragile. She could have been (as Sondheim apparently wanted) a viable Louise early on in her career. But Rose? No. Not a question of whether she had the voice for it. She just wouldn't have been a very good fit.
Liza was the first choice for a revival in the 1980s, as was Bette Midler. Neither wanted to do 8 shows a week, and then Tyne Daly was cast after she appeared on Dolly Parton's variety show as a trucker.
Doesn’t she say in her memoir she was told by Laurents that she would star in the next screen treatment of it, and then Bette did it. (Though famously, Bette was originally hoping to do MAME.)
I've never thought Liza was too fragile for it or too desperate for approval or whatever Arthur thought. Certainly an element of those is there but her persona was never as simple as fragility. It was fighting *against* that sense fragility. Blustering, taking over, talking a mile a minute to hide how fragile the character is. Normally the character ultimately falling victim to it but rarely in a way that was fatal.
Consciously or not most of the anthems Kander and Ebb wrote for her follow the thread of Cabaret (song). In the context of the show Cabaret is meant to be understood as another denial by Sally. As just a song it's an anthem of survival. A theme repeated with built in support from the text in both her big numbers in NYNY. Francine's got a bad marriage and is functionally an overworked single mother but both NYNY and But the World Goes Round lament how dark life can get while looking towards a possibly imagined bright light ahead.
With that in mind I think she would have been great for the take Mendes wanted to do with the material. Not to replace Bernadette. I just think if there is a take on Rose I've heard where I go "Liza could've done that" it's his. She was not in Rose shape by the time of his actual revival though.
A Fosse take with Liza or Chita would have been interesting because he lived that life in a way. But he died at the top of the sweet spot for a Liza Rose. (From around 1986 to 1997)
Liza never played the kind of bully or savvy manipulator that Rose is. I get "she's an actress, and therefore who can say what she could have played if given the chance?" but I don't see her pulling it off. I think she'd have come across, bafflingly, as the real victim, with Herbie and her children as the people who unfairly abandoned her.
I have nothing real to contribute to this conversation other than I’ve always loved the way she says “get offa my runway” in her version of Rose’s Turn.
TheQuibbler said: "I have nothing real to contribute to this conversation other than I’ve always loved the way she says “get offa my runway” in her version of Rose’s Turn."
