Tommy Femia, Judy Garland tribute artist extraordinaire, has been a frequent visitor to the Ice Palace over the past two decades, but on the last day of July, Femia’s Garland brought along Rick Skye, as daughter Liza Minnelli, for a good old fashioned night of singing, with Ricky Ritzel at the Yamaha and Chuck McTague on lights and sound.
After an instrumental overture that consisted of a medley of signature songs “The Man that Got Away,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Maybe This Time,” Femia’s Garland began on an upbeat note with “Hey, Look Me Over,” from “Wildcat,” written for Lucille Ball; “The Trolley Song;” and an idyllic, name dropping look at the afterlife in “My Home Sweet Heaven.” Skye adapted the likes of “Wilkommen,” from “Cabaret,” blended with “Old Friend,” from “Merrily We Roll Along;” “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Herr” to tell of Liza, her “gay marriages,” her ailments, and so on, while mangling Kander and Ebb into Scramble and Egg, and Proposition 8 into Preparation H. Her “Ring Them Bells,” paired with Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” concerned “Sex and the City” and a man who done Liza wrong.
A highlight of the evening was Femia and Skye’s recreation of a medley Judy and Liza sang at the Palladium in 1964, including “Hooray for Love,” “After You’ve Gone,” “’Swonderful,” “I Like New York in June,” “You and the Night and the Music,” and “It All Depends on You.”
Femia explored, in a moving “Fifty Percent,” from “Ballroom,” the sort of torch song Garland might have come to sing, and continued with classics, “Rockaby your baby with a Dixie melody” and “Over the Rainbow.” Skye returned with showstoppers “Maybe This Time” and “New York, New York,” and the duo took their leave pairing “Happy Days” with “Get Happy.”