Author: Brian Butler

For over two decades actor Rick Skye has been getting under the skin of gay icon Liza Minnelli but his career could have gone in a totally different direction.

He hit the stage as a child as Max in the Sound of Music and his teacher told his mother: “this one’s a character.” At 14 he was studying ballet and tap and later at New York University he studied acting but also enrolled in the globally famous Joffrey Ballet School.

And he’s appeared with some of Broadway’s greatest leading ladies, including through a show called The American Dance Machine – we’re talking class here – Gwen Verdon, Sandy Duncan, Ann Reinking and Dorothy Louden.

After soap opera on TV, he auditioned for a show by singing Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, got the part and did three performances in New York. It just so happened Sedaka was in the audience and said to Rick:  “oh you sing high like I do.” Thus started a friendship and led to Rick creating The Flip Side of Neil Sedaka, where he performed the singer’s hits and also the B-sides of his records.

The show also included impersonations of comedy characters. His London debut was courtesy of the Theatre Museum, and he appeared at the Apollo Theatre.

He had written a piece called Mein Chair – a pun on Cabaret’s Mein Herr, based on a routine Liza (and before her Fred Astaire) had done with a swivel chair.

It was liked and he was told to write ”more of that Liza stuff.” So what had started as a short fill-in act while other performers got changed became the phenomenon that Rick has created globally  around the great lady.

But Rick is not just Liza. The multi award-winning performer has had hit revue after hit revue – including a comedic look at auditions for Mama Rose in Gypsy, played by drag queens, gigs in Edinburgh, Dublin and London’s West End and a wonderfully camp villainous portrayal of Kenny Canasta in Amazon Prime’s comedy City And The Beast.

But shows about Liza, about Judy and Liza and currently about Barbra and Liza, have taken him all over the world, and bring him to London this week for a short run at Charing Cross Theatre.

“It’s an affectionate tribute – it’s sentimental. The English like to adore stars but also see what’s funny about them. You are walking a tightrope – sending them up but also paying tribute,” he told me.

“It’s an affectionate tribute – it’s sentimental. The English like to adore stars but also see what’s funny about them.”

His current show Barbra and Liza Live! – with Steven Brinberg as Streisand – had its first outing in London in 2010, and they appeared again in 2018 at Piccadilly’s Crazy Coqs. Post-Covid the pair decided to run the show again.

At its dress rehearsal finale Rick had a heart attack, and needed a stent to be fitted. When he came out of the anaesthesia his first question to the doctor was “can I perform on stage next Monday?” And he did.

But he’s also a recent cancer survivor – thankfully now clear. But it meant five months of voice coaching. And a lot of physical rehab. “I’m feeling good – I’ve got my vocal muscles back to where they were.”

I wondered if he knew if Liza had seen his impersonation and if she approved. “I’ve been to her shows and met her and told her I loved her like everyone does. But I don’t think I’m on her radar,” he said.

“I try to do as good a job as possible to remind people how wonderful she is. I keep saying that I won’t do it anymore, but then new offers come along, and new bits get added to the show.”

I wondered what advice he’d give to the aspiring young Rick: “calm down. I’ve always been anxious about things, and everything worked out – just calm down.”

“When you’re a little gay kid, everything’s doubly nerve wracking. I was bullied from my first day at school – I was smaller and younger and a cissy to them. Times are different now. I’m just walking around as me. I don’t see the problem of who I am – it’s just me.”

Rick appears with Steven Brinberg in Barbra and Liza Live! at Charing Cross Theatre from 6-17 November. Tickets – charingcrosstheatre.co.uk. Look out for my review in Scene magazine.