A
daughter holds Garland legacy aloft
Reviewed by John Shand
June 2, 2008
Lorna Luft, City Rectal Hall, Sydney,
Australia, May 31
Two years ago Lorna Luft stopped shying away
from her mother's songs, and confronted
them. Head on. How else could you do it,
when your mother is Judy Garland?
The result,
Songs My
Mother Taught Me, is a strutting,
swaggering rampage through the Garland
repertoire, strewn with anecdotes and
splattered with a few tears.
The show is a masterclass in construction:
in contouring the song sequence, in making
scripted patter sound spontaneous, in
integrating patter and songs and, above all,
in slick musical direction, courtesy of
Luft's husband, Colin Freeman.
None of that would count had Luft not been
blessed with a voice the size of Caesar's
Palace, and, as genetics would have it, not
dissimilar to her mother's. Performing these
songs it is neither a very subtle nor an
especially moving instrument, but it blasts
across an 11-piece band with a vibrato as
wide as a freeway, making her the very model
of the genus known as "belter", and the very
definition of chutzpah.
That's those genes at work again. And in
case you missed the connection, Judy
routinely appears on a big screen, including
singing to a young Lorna at the outset.
Garland had made 39 movies by the time she
was 37, a freakish statistic when combined
with the myriad live shows and radio
broadcasts. Luft, who was only 16 when she
lost her mother, tells what it's like to
forever run into her in greeting-card shops
and on television.
She duetted with her mother on a medley
including
I Can't
Give You Anything But Love, and
then gave a squalling
Chicago,
with the locally assembled band pin-sharp
and sounding twice its size in a flawless
Recital Hall sound-mix.
There were some songs best left in the
vaults, and some moments of showbiz
mawkishness of the sort Americans lap up.
We tend to be more wary of the sentiment
equivalent of fast food.
Such lapses, however, could not fight the
fact that Luft is the gifted daughter of a
very special mother.
