Publication: Limelight Magazine
Date: 8 June 2019
By: Mal Byrne

Ute Lemper. Photograph © Lucas Allen

A fateful phone call between an aging star and an emerging starlet becomes the vehicle for an unforgettable evening of exquisite cabaret.

Hailed as the new Marlene after a Paris production of Cabaret, but embarrassed at the comparison, Ute Lemper wrote a letter of apology to the legend who had locked herself away in her Paris apartment, “I stopped showing my face, I was sick of being Marlene Dietrich”. Returning to her own apartment after a performance, Lemper was shocked to be handed a message from the night porter telling her to ring Dietrich. What ensued was a three-hour conversation (where Dietrich did the talking as she refused to be questioned) where the baton was passed from star to starlet.

While that telephone conversation is the foundation for this rendezvous, Lemper becomes the first person vessel for Dietrich’s part both in spoken word and song. Even though she breaks into the third person momentarily at a couple of critical junctures, Lemper recreates Marlene for the audience. However, this is not an impersonation. While Lemper’s speaking voice closely resembles that of her idol, she has a much stronger singing voice and wider range. Lemper gives her own voice to the material, but in doing so, conveys the essence of what made Dietrich a charismatic artist.

There were two Dietrichs of course. The world feted the femme fatale and the untouchable chanteuse. However, Lemper searches for the flesh and blood, the woman who spoke up for herself (“think like a boss, but act like a lady”; Billy Wilder said that she was like one of the boys), the polygamist and bisexual, androgynous lover of many famous people. Of particular focus is Dietrich’s fraught relationship with her home country, Germany. Indeed, Lemper posits that Germany’s failure to come to terms with Dietrich’s loyalty to the United States in World War II is symptomatic of its failure to come to terms with itself and the Nazi catastrophe.

The performance begins with Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Dietrich’s opening number upon her 1962 return to German soil, an anthem to the horror of war, nationalism and arrogance repeating itself: “after this song, nothing can be sung”. Also achingly poignant was Just a Gigolo, the last number she sang on the screen. However, Lemper also gives us the bawdiness that epitomised Dietrich in cabaret in Arlen’s One For My Baby where Lemper’s jazz improvisation soared and the raucous Boys in the Back Room from the Western Destry Rides Again. The Weimar favourites Naughty Lola and Illusions were perhaps a little cursory compared to Lemper’s offerings on past tours.

After the interval, Lemper returned in a white outfit reminiscent of Dietrich’s Bacharach period and sang Cole Porter’s risqué Laziest Gal in Town, but then we returned to Dietrich’s Paris apartment and her final years, her bittersweet memories of the war (Lille Marlene, Hollander’s Ruins of Berlin and Marie), her affair with Piaf (I Wish You Love) and that Jean Gabin was the love of her life (Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas).

Lemper and Dietrich shared a love of the German poet Maria Rainer Rilke and Dietrich replied to Lemper’s letter because she “wanted to be with those who know secret things or else alone”. She advised Lemper to keep her private life, her heart for herself, “otherwise they will kick you to death”. In the end, she was happiest when working; “paradise is boring, can’t work, serve, sing”.

Jean Cocteau told Dietrich that “your name starts with a caress and finishes with a horse-whip”. She was a mix of the sensual and the powerful and Lemper gives that fusion an exquisite airing in this memorable production.

Click here to see the review on Limelight Magazine.

Publication: Broadway World (Adelaide)
Date: Saturday 8th June 2019
By: Barry Lenny

In 1988, Ute Lemper had a three-hour telephone conversation with Marlene Dietrich, recreated here in Ute Lemper – Rendezvous with Marlene for the 2019 Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Lemper tells Dietrich’s life story, punctuated with many of the songs that we associate with her. Just as Dietrich was one of the biggest names and most respected Kabarett performers of her day, so Lemper fills that role in today’s cabaret scene, whilst maintaining strong links to the seminal years during the Weimar republic.

At the age of 24, early in her career, the Parisian press referred to Ute Lemper as “la nouvelle Marlene” in response to her Molière Award winning performance in the lead role of Sally Bowles in a French production of the musical, Cabaret, prompting her to write a letter to Dietrich apologising for the attention from the media and their comparison. Dietrich was then 78 and a bedridden recluse, never leaving her apartment in Avenue Montaigne, near the Champs-Elysées, her only links to the world being newspapers, letters, and her telephone. Her telephone bill was around three thousand dollars a month, and there were thousands of books in her apartment. Lemper was in disbelief when Dietrich rang her, and talked for those three hours. This is not, though, a dry documentary. Ute Lemper the actress is to the fore in this performance, playing Dietrich telling her own story.

This is far more than a chronology of her life and career. Lemper takes us deeper into the mind of Dietrich, her personal memories, her loves, her thoughts, her feelings, her many sexual encounters, and her relationships, that with Germany, and that with her daughter, Maria Riva, both sad and tragic. Her daughter wrote a damning book about her lack of love from Marlene, who substituted it, and her presence, with money, and telling everything, warts and all. At Dietrich’s pleading, she held publication of the book, Marlene Dietrich – The Life by Her Daughter, until her mother had died.

Lemper’s performance as Dietrich is exceptional, aided by, like Dietrich, being fluent in English and French, as well as their native German. On top of that are her sensational interpretations of the many songs that link the sections of the monologue, beginning with Pete Seeger‘s Where Have All the Flowers Gone, the anthem for youth lost to wars. Nearing the end of her life, Irving Ceasar’s Just a Gigolo, from 1929, is a poignant reminder of one’s mortality, and the sadness of dying alone, and Johnny Mercer‘s One For My Baby, continued that theme of loneliness. In just those first three songs it was clear that we were going to hear some superb arrangements and interpretations during the remainder of the evening.

The songs were wide ranging and eclectic, with Bob Dylan‘s Blowing in The Wind; alongside Frank Loesser and Friedrich Hollaender’s The Boys in the Backroom, Hollaender’s Lola, from her first film from 1930, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), and, of course, perhaps her biggest hit, Lili Marleen (Lili Marlene), the Hans Leip poem that was set to music by Norbert Schultze. Fredrich Hollaender, naturally, featured again with Black Market and The Ruins of Berlin. Burt Bacharach, her occasional music director, and film director, Billy Wilder, featured in both the monologue and the songs, as did Edith Piaf. Lemper’s rendition of Belgian cabaret star, Jacques Brel‘s, Ne me quitte pas was deeply moving, its German lyrics saying “Do not go”, a desperate plea to a lover who is leaving, rather than the insipid English version, “If you go away”.

Pianist, Vana Gierig, led the quartet, a standard jazz trio of piano, bass, Romain Lecuyer, and drums, Matthias Daneck, plus Cyril Garac on violin, the musicians providing impeccable accompaniment and support.

It was all too quickly over, though, and standing ovations brought forth an encore, but the audience would have stayed all night, given the chance.

In retrospect, of course, Lemper was perfectly correct. She is not the new Dietrich; she is the one and only, original, Ute Lemper.

Click here to read the review on Broadway World, and view video clips.