Creators: David Saffert and Jillian Snow
Musical Director: Duncan Waugh
From the moment the curtain rises on Liberace, swathed in a bright red sequinned cape and grinning like a man who has never once doubted he is the most interesting person in the room, you know exactly what kind of night you are in for. Liberace & Liza is two hours of pure, riotous joy, and it arrives with a small act of nerve: the tribute act is usually the most disreputable form in show business, karaoke with a costume budget, yet here are David Saffert and Jillian Snow staking their claim to it in a proper West End house, the Harold Pinter, no less.
The premise is gloriously silly. Liberace and Liza Minnelli never shared a stage in life, but Liberace & Liza imagines what might have happened if they had: two enormous personalities, each convinced the night belongs to them, circling one another for the spotlight across the best part of two hours. Saffert plays Liberace as all candelabra grandeur and bottomless self-regard, parked at the piano; Snow’s Liza is a glorious scatterbrain, all restless, barely contained energy, forever charging off down one anecdote before she has finished the last. They are caricatures, broad and unsubtle and entirely deliberate, but, crucially, they are caricatures drawn with affection rather than mockery. You never feel the performers are sneering at their subjects. You feel, instead, that they adore them, and that love is what lifts the whole enterprise clear of pastiche.
It helps enormously that both of them can genuinely do it. This is the line a show like this has to walk, and Liberace & Liza walks it with ease: the comedy only works because the musicianship underneath it is the real thing. Saffert is a classically trained pianist, and it shows; his playing is dazzling, all flourish and filigree, exactly the kind of showmanship Liberace himself traded on.
Snow has a powerhouse voice and the control to match it, equally at home wringing the drama out of a Kander and Ebb standard and sending it up moments later. Their comic timing, too, is close to immaculate, the interplay between them so well judged that even the improvised stretches and the back-and-forth with the audience land cleanly. There is a playful, slightly competitive chemistry between the two that never once flags.
Where the show announces that it is cleverer than it strictly needs to be is in its handling of the songbook. The standards are all present and correct, the Cabaret and New York, New York numbers you would expect, delivered with obvious relish. But it is the modern material that turns a charming novelty into something rather inspired. A Liberace-and-Liza reading of Britney Spears’s Toxic has no business being as funny or as musically satisfying as it is; a riotous Spice Girls Wannabe sends the room into open delight; and the decision to bring the house down with an encore of Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club, of all things, is the kind of gleeful anachronism that tells you the show knows exactly what it is and exactly how much fun it intends to have. These are not lazy crowd-pleasers dropped in to fish for recognition. They are reimagined with wit and considerable skill, threaded into the camp logic of the evening as though Liberace and Liza had always been waiting for them.
What stays with you afterwards is the sheer generosity of it. It is a rare show that has you grinning from ear to ear before a note has been played, and never once gives you cause to stop. There is no flat patch to report, no sequence that overstays its welcome, no joke left stranded; just two performers of real ability, having the time of their lives and inviting you to do the same.
There is something quietly radical in a summer of weighty revivals and serious intentions about a night this single-mindedly committed to joy. Saffert and Snow have taken a form usually written off as cheap novelty and, through sheer skill and unmistakable love for their subjects, made one of the most purely entertaining nights the West End has to offer. Camp, dazzling, and far cleverer than it lets on: go, and take everyone you know.
Runs until 4 July 2026 and then at Edinburgh Fringe Festival
