Two Days Before Cabaret Opened, Liza Was Already Owning the Moment
Past Blast! There are performances that become iconic because history tells us they were important — and then there are performances where you can practically watch the history arriving in real time.
Liza Minnelli’s live rendition of “Maybe This Time” on The Dick Cavett Show aired on February 11, 1972. Two days later, on February 13, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret opened at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre.
So this is not Liza coming back months later to perform a song after the movie had become a phenomenon. This is Liza right on the edge of it.
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The Liza Minnelli Cabaret Edit
Revisit the performance, film and music that turned one already-great song into a Liza Minnelli signature.
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“Maybe This Time” Had Already Been Liza’s Song for Years
One of the best pieces of this story is that “Maybe This Time” was not originally written for Cabaret.
John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote the song years earlier, and Minnelli had already recorded it for her 1964 debut album, Liza! Liza!. She returned to it again before the movie, which meant the song was already part of her musical vocabulary long before Sally Bowles got hold of it.
Minnelli later recalled that when Bob Fosse needed a song for the film, she suggested “Maybe This Time.” Fosse initially thought it was too maudlin. Liza’s response was basically: not if you sing it with hope.
And that is the whole damn song.
It is not just sadness. It is somebody who has been disappointed enough times to know better, deciding to believe one more time anyway. Minnelli understands that tension instinctively, and the Cavett performance lets you hear it without the visual machinery of the film around her.
Then Cabaret Turned the Song Into a Movie-Music Landmark
Two days after the Cavett broadcast, Cabaret opened in New York and “Maybe This Time” took on an entirely different life.
In the film, the song becomes one of Sally Bowles’ most revealing moments. The brassy confidence slips just enough for the need underneath it to show. She wants to believe that this relationship, this chance, this version of herself might finally be the one that works.
That combination of vulnerability and sheer Liza force helped make the song one of her defining performances — despite the fact that it had never appeared in the original 1966 Broadway score.
And the movie did rather well for itself, to put it mildly. At the 45th Academy Awards, Cabaret won eight Oscars, including Best Actress for Minnelli, Best Supporting Actor for Joel Grey and Best Director for Bob Fosse.
Look at Liza Before the Oscar, Before the Myth Got Bigger
That is what makes these Cavett images so delicious to revisit now. We know what is coming next. She does not.
There is no Best Actress Oscar yet. No decades of “Maybe This Time” being treated as one of the essential Liza Minnelli songs. No need to perform the weight of a legend that has already been written.
There is just a 25-year-old performer sitting in that brief, electric space between doing the work and finding out how enormous the response is about to become.
More than half a century later, none of the electricity has worn off. The performance still has that feeling of somebody building toward the final note because she absolutely has to get there.
That is why “Maybe This Time” survives every revival, every cover and every new generation discovering Cabaret. The song promises hope while sounding like it already knows how badly hope can hurt.
And Liza? She does not merely sing that contradiction. She detonates it.
Watch Liza Minnelli Perform “Maybe This Time” on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972
The official Dick Cavett Show archive dates Minnelli’s appearance to February 11, 1972 — two days before Cabaret opened in New York.
Sources: The Dick Cavett Show; AFI Catalog; Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Playbill.
