Publication: artsreviewsedinburgh.com
By: Tom King
Date: August 2024

Ute Lemper – Rendezvous With Marlene at the Queen’s Hall tonight was a one-night only show that, as you will have guessed from the title, was about one woman, the iconic Marlene Dietrich.

This production is based on a phone call between Dietrich and Ute Lemper in 1988 just after the papers announced that Ute Lemper was “The New Dietrich” and Ute had written a letter to Marlene apologising for the comparison between the two of them. The call (originally missed by Ute) was initially going to be a short one and ended up lasting some 3 hours as Marlene Dietrich surprisingly opened up about her life and her many lost loves.

It took Ute Lemper some 30 years to take up Marlene’s offer to tell her story, and I first saw this show in 2020. Tonight, I realised that last time around I had overlooked so many little moments in this story as we follow Marlene’s public and private life from making “The Blue Angel” in Germany then leaving the country of her birth to find international movie stardom in Hollywood, her hatred for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, through to the final years of her life, alone with only her old memories (and a lot of champagne) in an apartment in Paris.

We start this show with Ute Lemper taking that unexpected phone call from Marlene, then very quickly it is Ute that is on the end of the telephone and Marlene that is on stage telling her story, and what a story it is.  Here was a woman decades ahead of her time in how she dressed, how she spoke, and her openness about her marriage and her many lovers, both men and women.

Ute Lemper is without doubt the cabaret star of her generation, and clearly understands the power of cabaret, the power of words and songs, and the very power of the cabaret of the Weimar Republic that Marlene Dietrich emerged from.

This story also features some of the songs made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Some you would expect to be here – “Lili Marlene” and ““Falling In Love Again”, but there were a few surprises too. Amongst these surprises were powerful interpretations of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” (Pete Seeger), “La Vie en Rose” (Edith Piaf) and “Ne me quitte pas” (Jacques Brel). Like all of the music in this show, these songs were carefully chosen to have real meaning at the right moment in Marlene Dietrich’s story, with everything enhanced by the careful selection of archive films projected behind Ute Lemper on stage.

Whether it be in words or song, Ute Lemper knows how to put emotion into them, and with a whisper can achieve more than many other contemporary performers can achieve shouting loudly. This show was just a perfect example of how a cabaret artist at the peak of their powers can spellbind an audience with words and music, leaving a room silent, everyone waiting for her next word to be spoken.

Review by Tom King © 2024
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