New York City
The heir to musical-theater royalty returns to the stage after a long battle with breast cancer.
Lorna Luft — actress of television, film, and stage, and daughter of the legendary Judy Garland — will perform her solo cabaret show Accentuate the Positive at Birdland Jazz Club on Monday, June 9.
The performance will celebrate the successful outcome of her two-year battle with breast cancer. In October 2013, she hosted a two-night benefit concert for the Actors Fund, Lorna's Pink Party, which raised over $150,000 for Breast Cancer Awareness Month and cancer research charities.
Accentuate the Positive will include many beloved standards, as well as a special section that pays tribute to Johnny Mercer, one of Luft's close family friends. A four-time Academy Award winner, Mercer wrote the lyrics to Judy Garland's TV-show theme song, which later became "A Song for Lorna" and which Garland sang to her daughter on the show.
Luft made her Broadway debut in 1971 as a replacement in the role of Fran Kubelik in Promises, Promises. She also starred in the 1981 national tour of They're Playing Our Song and played Adelaide in the American and world tour productions of Guys and Dolls from 1992-94. In October 2007, she released her debut CD, Lorna Luft: Songs My Mother Taught Me, in the U.K.