Charismatic and multi-talented performer Lorna Luft, daughter of Judy Garland, is currently captivating West End audiences with her show Songs My Mother Taught Me. The multi-media show embraces the songs and orchestrations Garland used in her own concerts and video technology allows Luft to sing duets with her mother.
Luft, now 51, is the daughter of Garland’s third husband, producer Sid Luft, and half-sister of Liza Minnelli. Her life and career are the stuff of showbiz legend. At the age of 11, her mother claimed that she was a better singer than anyone else in the family. “Lorna has more talent than all of us put together,” she said.
Six years ago she wrote a candid, bestselling autobiography Me and My Shadows - A Family Memoir, which was made into an award-winning TV series Life with Judy Garland - Me and My Shadows, starring Judy Davis as Garland. Garland herself died tragically from an accidental drugs overdose in 1969.
“I had written my book and I was in the middle of co-producing the TV series and I thought ‘I think I can do this show’,” Luft says, sitting in a smart Kensington restaurant. “I felt I was ready to take on this incredible musical legacy that my mother left not only for me but for everybody. My best friend is Barry Manilow and, when I eventually decided to do the show, I asked his advice. He just laughed and said it was about time.
“There’s a whole new generation out there who don’t know who my mother was. Everyone knows the name Dorothy but they may not know the name Judy Garland. That’s what I want people to know.”
Luft’s stage debut was as a young girl, when her mother brought her onstage during a performance at New York’s Palace Theatre to sing to a wildly ecstatic audience.
“I was 14 and too young to be nervous,” she says. “You have to remember that I wasn’t walking on stage with Judy Garland. I was walking on stage with my mum. It’s really a big difference. She was so supportive and it was so comforting. She would stand in the wings and watch my first couple of numbers and then when I’d look, she had gone. It was ‘Spread your wings and fly’.”
Luft admits that her mother taught her stagecraft but her early musical influences were from outside the family.
“I was a regular lunatic, screaming teenager,” she laughs. “I was a Motown junkie and then, when the British music invasion started, it changed my whole view of music. I was so lucky to grow up with the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Beatles. The Beatles influenced my singing style and so did Barbra Streisand. She has a unique and incredible voice.”
She went on to star on Broadway in her own right in the shows Promises, Promises and Snoopy and later toured in musicals such as Girl Crazy, Gypsy and Guys and Dolls.
“My favourite musical is Guys and Dolls,” she says. “It is a piece that can be incredibly dangerous. It’s very easy to make cartoon people out of the characters but if you do that nobody is going to buy the show. The characters speak like that because they are bums who think they are royalty.
“The hardest role for me to play physically and emotionally was the showbiz mother from hell, Madam Rose in Gypsy. It was painful because I was really playing my own grandmother and that was just horrible. Madam Rose is a monster but if you make her a monster, the audience won’t like her. You have to show how she is driven and why.”
Luft later achieved fame through major US TV shows and in films such as Grease 2 and Where the Boys Are ‘84. An electrifying solo artist, she has appeared in big concert halls in the US, Canada and in the UK, including several sell-out dates at the London Palladium. She toured with Dave Willetts and more recently with Wayne Sleep in their hit show Broadway and Hollywood. As a performer she takes care of her voice and is strongly anti-smoking.
“When you’re doing a big show you have to look after your voice. Your voice is an instrument. If you don’t treat your voice like an athlete does his body, it will just give out. I do vocal warm ups and I also do one really important thing that I learnt from my friend Celine Dion. I have a one non-speaking day. I just shut up for the whole day.
“My current show is a hard-sing and I don’t go partying after the performance. The thing that makes me nuts about London is the smoking. I can’t go into pubs or restaurants. I can’t believe there is only one non-smoking restaurant in London - Rules. That’s shocking! They’ve banned smoking in Ireland and riots haven’t broken out in the streets, so why not here?”
Luft is no stranger to London. Her mother was a regular performer in the capital in the sixties, often appearing at the London Palladium and the Dominion Theatre.
“London is my second home,” says Luft. “My husband [the musician and arranger Colin Freeman] is British and I grew up here from the age of eight. I’ve played places in Britain that no one has ever been. Worthing Pavilion? Been there, done that.”
So does she see any differences between Broadway and London audiences ?
“A big difference. People here know what they like and they go and see something whether one critic liked it or not. I also think that the British public are much, much more loyal. They’re not fickle. American audiences are very fickle because everything has to be new. They want the newest things rather than honouring the past. That’s why I wanted to bring this show to London.”
Although comparisons between her mother and sister are inevitable, Luft is very much her own person. A woman of warmth and keen intelligence, she is justly proud of her mother’s legacy.
“My mother wasn’t tragic at all,” she says with a smile. “There was tragedy in her life. She always protected us from the pressure she had been put under in Hollywood. I had this amazing and wonderful childhood. And it’s just so great that with technology today that we can sing duets together onstage in this show. I can tell you it feels great. It’s really comforting. The audience gets very emotional. Boy, I wish I had the Kleenex concession on this show.”
• Lorna Luft is appearing in Songs My Mother Taught Me at the Savoy Theatre until August 28
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