Liza’s ’72 spectacular restored for Showtime

updated 3:26 p.m. ET March 29, 2006

NEW YORK - It’s a curious thing: When discussing her TV special, “Liza with a ‘Z”’ (which, above all, spotlights Liza Minnelli) the woman in the title keeps steering the talk to other names.

Like Bob Fosse, the legendary Broadway and Hollywood director-choreographer who crafted her show.

“I think it’s a Fosse gem,” Minnelli says. “I’m proud to be a part of that work.”

“Liza with a ‘Z”’ feasts on Liza in concert at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater the night of May 31, 1972, captured with eight 16mm cameras documentary-style without missing a beat. It premiered on NBC that September, making a splash and winning a Peabody Award as well as four Emmys, then encored in March and September 1973.

It has not aired since, until — rescued from near ruin and fully restored frame by frame, with the sound remixed from mono to Dolby 5.1 stereo — it returns on Showtime Saturday at 8 p.m. EST (as part of a free preview weekend for non-Showtime cable subscribers).

“It never looked this good,” says Minnelli with gusto, certain that its mastermind, who died in 1987, would approve: “Fosse’s applauding from heaven!”

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The passage of decades is clear from the moment Liza strides on stage in her white Halston pants suit and white boa. Not only is the big-eyed girl with the even bigger voice a baby-faced 26 years old, but she soon addresses her not-yet-quite-a-household-name status in the lead-up to her title song: “I find that, still, a lot of people call me Lisa,” she confides.

It’s been a long time since anybody needed to be told her name is Liza with a “z”.

But even in 1972, Liza — daughter of Judy Garland and her second husband, director Vincent Minnelli — was a show-biz veteran. She had starred in films including “The Sterile Cuckoo” and the Fosse-directed “Cabaret” (released earlier that year), for which she would win an Oscar. And at 19, she had won a Tony for the Broadway musical “Flora the Red Menace.”

Then on “Liza with a ‘Z’,” Liza sealed the deal for a mass TV audience, triumphantly.

“All of the confidence I have when I walk out is because I’m surrounded with people who really think I’m the best there is, and showed me how to be better,” explains Minnelli (who turned 60 last month) during a recent interview in Manhattan. “It was the people who were with me. I felt safe and secure.”

She calls “Liza with a ‘Z”’ part of an ongoing collaboration between herself and Fosse as well as the songwriting team Fred Ebb and John Kander (who wrote special music for that program but whose other stellar output includes “New York, New York,” the Martin Scorsese-directed film in which Minnelli costarred with Robert De Niro, and “Cabaret”).

During the hour, Minnelli serves up a varied menu including “God Bless the Child,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” “My Mammy,” “Bye, Bye Blackbird” and, of course, a “Cabaret” medley.

For the sassy, now-forgotten Joe Tex hit “I Gotcha,” she vamps in a red sequined mini that must have had the network censor seeing red.

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