Lorna Luft performed at Crazy Coqs, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Lorna Luft’s love affair with London goes back to the 1960s when her mother Judy Garland decided to move to the British capital, ultimately bringing her kids along.
Aside from a few theatrical appearances at other venues, notably in Babes in Arms at Chichester, Songs My Mother Taught Me at the Savoy, and the first tour of White Christmas, Luft’s London home has come to be the Crazy Coqs, where for a full decade she’s been holding yearly week-long, sold-out engagements.
Luft, just like her mother Garland and sister Liza Minnelli, is a fighter. This was her second time at the venue since she was taken ill with cancer during her concert run at The Pheasantry a few years ago.
It was wonderful to see her back in great form and even more passionate about her craft, as many of us are after 18 months of Covid restrictions. We could tell these months have been an ordeal for her as she recounted her despair at not having an audience, sometimes even singing to the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone!
Appropriately starting the concert with a pop song, ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, Luft moved on to selections from her favourite composers, starting with Johnny Mercer.
Mercer, as she revealed to the audience, had a long-time affair with her mother, dating back to when he wrote ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe’ for her to perform in The Harvey Girls in 1946.
Luft then delivered a spectacular medley of Mercer’s most famous songs, including ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, ‘Moon River’ of course and ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ from the movie Daddy Long Legs, for which he also wrote the music.
Moving on to her second favourite composer, Jerry Herman, Luft sang a spirited ‘It’s Today’, followed by two gems he wrote for Mack and Mabel, ‘Wherever He Ain’t’ and ‘Time Heals Everything’, a song Luft mentions she would have loved to teach her mother, which is understandable considering the fact that Herman often said he wrote his most beautiful ballads with Garland in mind.
The evening got even more emotional when Luft paid tribute to her late brother-in-law, Australian singer-songwriter and entertainer Peter Allen, with a wonderful mashup of ‘Everything Old is New Again’ and ‘When I Get My Name in Lights’. Too bad she didn’t venture into ‘Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage’, the song Allen wrote as a tribute to her mother, but maybe that would have been too painful, her final rendition of ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ was already poignant enough.
All in all, this fast-paced 65-minute show was absolutely the best I’ve ever seen Luft perform in London, an emotional rollercoaster always perfectly accompanied by her husband Colin Freeman.
Our moments with Luft as she celebrates the glorious American songbook and shares her legacy with us have to be treasured.
Patrick Honoré
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