ICE CUBES: Liza Minnelli and Fiona Apple @ the Borgata, 3/24

I wouldn't dare cheapen my Saturday night with Liza Minnelli and Fiona Apple at the Borgata - separate shows, separate venues within one casino - by calling it an evening of "divas".

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ICE CUBES: Liza Minnelli and Fiona Apple @ the Borgata, 3/24

POSTED: Monday, March 26, 2012, 3:00 PM

Filed Under: Ice Cubes | Music Concert Review

I wouldn’t dare cheapen my Saturday night with Liza Minnelli and Fiona Apple at the Borgata — separate shows, separate venues within one casino — by calling it an evening of "divas". The word is rife with so many negative connotations that it doesn't do the performers justice. So I'll preface by saying two iconic singers — who happened to be women — rocked the Borgata to its core on Saturday night.

Minnelli sold out the Borgata’s Event Center. The daughter of the legendary Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli has long been both a product of her pedigree and an icon hell bound for individualism. It’s her dramatic, halting and shushing way with a song (to say nothing of a physicality currently blunted by a bum ankle broken not so long ago), the way she isolates each syllable that makes Liza with a "Z" iconic.

With a small big band of familiars behind her, Minnelli, 66, ran through her usual theatrical classics: the flashily quick paced likes of “Alexander’s Rag Time Band” and signature numbers such as “Cabaret” and “Say Liza” with gusto. Occasionally, Minnelli sounded rushed and out of breath on these faster tunes. “I think I swallowed a sequin,” she said during one rush preceding the grandly stammering “But the World Goes Round.” Those moments were good and necessary hits but luckily, Minnelli stuck to a klatch of slower, more simmering ballads that allowed her to use jazzier elements of her vocal inflection that some of her chosen Broadway standards wouldn’t. With longtime accompanist, pianist Billy Stritch, Minnelli played with “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and turned the medley of “Here I'll Stay/Our Love Is Here to Stay” into romantic banter of the highest order. French composer Charles Aznavour’s daring “What Makes a Man a Man” (“After strip-teasing each night the men look so surprised / I change my sex before their eyes”) became a chattily icy tango complete with a seductive soprano sax whistling behind her. She waltzed ever-so-slowly through a heartbreakingly breathless (in a good way) “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” and an acapella “I’ll Be Seeing You” as her fanciful charmed finale. But her finest moment (other than that Aznavour song) came when she sang “Confessions,” the title track from the most intimately recorded album of 2010. Slow, bawdy and bluesy, Minnelli crawled playfully through the wiry witty track, from The Band Wagon musical, as only the best sort of interpretative singer could. Lines like "I never had a taste for wine, now isn't that a sin? / I never had a taste for wine, for wine can't compare with gin” and “I always go to bed at 10 — and then go home at 4” sounded both contemporary and continental in a fashion that would make Noel Coward smile.

Fiona Apple’s sold-out performance at the Music Box Theater at the Borgata contained the same amount of theatricality and breathless qualities as Minnelli’s show. The intensity just came from different places in this woman’s soul.

From the second Apple bounded onto the stage — all yoga-body-muscular and Max-Cady-taut — and jolted through “Fast as You Can,” she seemed to be on fire. The veins in her neck throbbed as she lunged through the tongue-speaking halt of “A Mistake,” as her spiky ensemble rambled along with its boisterous brand of ambient electronica, eerie jazz country and noise. The lean mean Apple stomped her boots into the stage and wiggled the bottom of her gown as if she was dancing a jog to put out a camp fire. She let the ends of her phrases growl and scuff, her voice much heavier and huskier than the last time I saw her (seven years ago when her last album came out) until she hit the rolling positivism of "Extraordinary Machine." Once there, she began with her heavenly upper range intact before crumbling into the dirt and the dire. "I'm good at being uncomfortable," she winced.

Apple wasn’t just there to celebrate her past, even though she grumbled proudly through the descending chords of “Criminal” and the chilling lyrics of “I've been a bad bad girl I've been careless with a delicate man” with weird pride. The 34-year-old is there to introduce adoring audiences to The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw, and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, her new work due in June. From that new album, she played songs that allowed her to bang on things and use her trademark guttural howl. She struck a homemade percussion pipe instrument on “Anything We Want” and found desire a troubling thing. She pounded on a piano during the loveless ballad, “Valentine” that grew more sinister as the morbidly melodic track went on. She turned the arch pop of “Every Single Night” into a psychoanalytical reverie with the line "Every single night is a fight with my brain" sung in a fashion that made you fear for the immediate future.

Apple did with Conway Twitty’s classic operatic ballad "It's Only Make Believe” what Minnelli did an hour earlier with “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Every word and syllable seemed like its own lonely portrait, a sad soliloquy where losing love at any cost is more admirable than never having held it in her arms. Amazing.

(@ADAmorosi)

Photos by Scott Weiner

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