March 27, 1973 “At that point in time, the Oscars ceremony was still a hometown celebration, as well as a global broadcast. I was facing an audience packed with people whom I'd grown up with, a community I knew. It was an echo of the feelings I had eight years before at the Cocoanut Grove. But the stakes were much bigger now. Before the night began, the unspoken buzz in the room was: Is this little girl gonna make good tonight? Will she measure up? I was fighting nerves and f

Fosse directs Liza. Photo from the Fosse/Verdon Collection at the Library of Congress “Fosse also had a lot to prove with Cabaret, and he didn't play it safe. […] Fosse's earlier film debut as the director of Sweet Charity had bombed-and his future was not secure. Now, he was determined to make a film that some called an "anti-musical," a show for people who didn't like musicals. It's true that he and his producers had titanic clashes over casting and content as filming progr

In her recently published memoir, she tells the story of appearing on The Judy Garland Show at 17: “Mama’s third episode, to my great surprise, was entirely built around me. It aired November 17, 1963. We rehearsed dance numbers intensely, and she looked on with pride as the show came together. It felt like my very own special. I was teary-eyed when Mama opened the evening singing a tender version of Uncle Ira’s lyrics to ‘Liza.’ There were large images of me from childhood t

In her recently published memoir, she talks about her first professional onstage appearance with her mother Judy Garland—headlining a concert at the London Palladium at 18! It was a trial by fire and she had to learn to hold the stage and make her own name next to her competitive mother. "London was going mad with Judy Garland fever. Fans stampeded the box office for tickets, and the November 8 date quickly sold out. A second concert was set for November 15. When Mama walked