Liza’s at the Palace, Liza Minnelli’s latest show, is in Woonsocket tonight through Sunday. The show’s next stop: New York City, where it has already been extended.

AP / STEPHEN CHERNIN

I’m not sure Liza Minnelli can help sounding like everything she says is the last line before launching into a song from a musical.

“I can’t wait to come up there!” she says breathlessly of heading to Woonsocket for a four-night stand at the Stadium Theatre. “I’m on my way!”

Minnelli is coming to the Stadium for a final tune-up of her latest show before it hits New York. She’s just come back from Italy (“talk about out of town!”) and the show, Liza’s at the Palace, has already been extended in New York before it’s even opened.

“Isn’t it great?” Minnelli gushes.

Minnelli says that she, director/choreographer Ron Lewis and the cast have reworked the show over the past year and a half, including a whole new first act that includes three brand-new songs, but the big new deal is the second half — Minnelli’s tribute to her godmother, MGM arranger and vocal coach Kay Thompson. Thompson was best known for appearances in films such as Funny Face, and writing the Eloise series of children’s books and her nightclub act. She spent her last years living with Minnelli until she died in 1998.

The tribute includes many of the songs that Thompson used in her own stage act, following her own arrangements, and they’re connected by stories about Thompson, her life and her effect on Minnelli.

“I tell stories about how she influenced me and how she changed my life and why she’s my godmother. That was the greatest gift my parents ever gave me.”

Minnelli did a version of the show at the Providence Performing Arts Center’s gala in January, but she says that the new show has more songs and stories (every one of which, she swears, is true), with at the same time a tighter focus.

“We finally got the script right!” she says. “I’m awfully pleased with it. I’m nervous as hell, but I’m ready! . . . I think it’s more consolidated; it’s more to the point.”

In the process, she says, “I’ve learned about economy. The stories are so personal that I would ramble [and say] ‘Here’s what I mean.’ I realized I just have to tell the story.”

In talking about Thompson, Minnelli ends up talking quite a bit about herself, which she finds difficult.

“It means a great deal to me,” Minnelli says. “I’ve never talked about myself on stage, and what I really feel in my personal life.” And the fact that she’s been a beloved performer for decades doesn’t change that: “I think the reason I’ve stayed where I am as long as I have is that I’m still worried about it. . . . I’m shy about it. But in order to explain who I am and what I became, I have to talk about her influence on me.”

Has it become more important that she explain who she is?

“It’s just that I’ve never done it before. I don’t think it’s that vital; I don’t think I’m that fascinating. But it’s interesting how I was influenced.”

Minnelli and the backup singers and dancers playing The Williams Brothers (Thompson’s backup group) learned the vocals first. “The musical arrangements were so fascinating. They were so complicated — thank God we learned them before we had someone really staging it.”

As a performer and arranger, Minnelli says of Thompson, “She was an underground force, an underground weapon. She created a whole new sound and a whole new way of not only arranging but performing. . . . It’s a tribute to a whole era that happened, and is still ahead of its time.”

Can you explain that? “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, but you can’t. All you can say is that she was an original. And then show people.”

And as a person, Minnelli says, Thompson “was a profound influence on everyone she met. Not only her godmother, but everyone she met. And I was witness to that. She was the one who said, ‘Stretch your arms out. Be more generous. Hit the note!’ She was just great.”

While they had the arrangements, they didn’t have any moving visual record of Thompson’s act. That’s where Ron Lewis, with whom Minnelli has worked off and on since 1970, came in.

Lewis says that he and Minnelli researched still photos from studios and from the nightclub Thompson performed in. “Everything in the show either came from the research we’d done or from Liza’s memories with Kay.” As for the stories, he says, “Some of them are poignant; some are funny as hell. . . . [And] the punchline of the thing is one of Kay’s witty, sophisticated sayings.”

Lewis explains that the show wasn’t originally going to be a show; it was going to be an album of Thompson’s music. Minnelli went into a record-company man’s office to explain the overview of the album. “And by the time she had explained it to him, she had already decided, ‘This is a show!’ ”

She called Lewis and got him on board, and two days later they all left for a tour date in Antwerp, Belgium. They started working on the first number there, in the afternoon before that evening’s show; they polished it at the next stop, in Stockholm, and in Helsinki, “we put the first number in.”

It went like that for about a year, Lewis says. “We rehearsed the next number in Uruguay, and we put it in in Rio! … I know this sounds padded, but it’s absolutely true.”

Lewis says that on one hand, it was hectic to construct a show on the road this way, but on the other, the installation of one number at a time was actually easier than the typical routine of getting a whole night’s worth of music together in five weeks in a rehearsal studio.

Not to say it’s ever completely ready: “You’d think we would be, but if we had another week we’d find more stuff to fix.”

“She would have loved [the show],” Minnelli says of Lewis’ creation. “It has style, and it feels so good doing it. Because he’s the best there is, and he’s my director and I’m a director’s daughter, and that’s the way it is.”

And after all this time, Minnelli’s trademark irrepressible joy is still in place. Asked whether she enjoys performing as much as she ever has, she replies, “I enjoy it more. I’m working with people I really admire and I love, and the fun part is really creating it.”

Liza Minnelli performs tonight, tomorrow night, Saturday and Sunday at the Stadium Theatre, 28 Monument Square, Main Street, Woonsocket. All shows are at 8 p.m. and tickets are $55 and $65. Call (401) 762-4545 or go to www.stadiumtheatre.com.

rmassimo@projo.com