All-singing, all-dancing librarian at your service!
All-singing, all-dancing librarian at your service!
Member since:28.03.2001
Reviews:77
Members who trust:23
The Act is a musical by my favourite Broadway team of songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and yet I always find it a little disappointing. Famous for writing Cabaret, Chicago and New York, New York, the two of them supplied a series of star turns for Liza Minnelli, as a nightclub star, and hence the C sounds very much like a Liza album, with a couple of other tracks thrown in.
The songs aren't bad, and some of them are rather good indeed. 'Arthur in the Afternoon'. for example, is top notch comedy, delivered perfectly by Liza, and the number sung by the chorus members (presumably while Liza had forty winks to get her breath back), 'Little Do They Know', works very well as an insiders view of being a Broadway-type dancer. There is also a lovely ballad called 'My Own Space', which Minnelli carries off fairly well.
Unfortunately, the rest of the CD consists of a parade of up-tempo, 'life is great (or if it's not, I'm going to act as though it is)' numbers which just become rather samey. They are all decent songs, and all sung well by Liza, but they're just a tad repetitive. These are the sort of songs at which Kander and Ebb excel, but they just don't win me over. The final number, 'Walking Papers' gives you a definite spring in your step after hearing it, but this could simply be because it comes after the ballad and thus feels fresher than some of the other bombastic numbers.
A CD for the background, or for adding to the random shuffle feature of Media Player or the iPod, but not a great listening experience on its own. For a much better experience of 'Liza sings Kander and Ebb', go for the movie Soundtrack to Cabaret!
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