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Source: PrideLife (Entertainment News)
Date: May 20, 2019

Thirty-one years ago Marlene Dietrich’s life was all but over, writes Cary Gee. She lived alone, apart from her memories of a life that more than rivalled any film script, in Paris where she saw and spoke to virtually no one. All the more extraordinary then, that she should have reached out to a young Ute Lemper, then playing the role of Lola in the Blue Angel, a role that Marlene had made famous 60 years earlier.

The two women, one whose career had ended, one on the cusp of international stardom, spoke for three hours. Their conversation forms the basis for Lemper’s new one-woman show, in which she spectacularly revives Dietrich’s life and legacy for a generation too young to recall the screen legend’s luminosity.

Such is the connection Lemper shares with Dietrich that at times, Rendezvous with Marlene feels less like a tribute, and more like a séance.

Both women left their “Heimat”, albeit under very different circumstances, to pursue an international career. Both returned to a re-unified Germany, although, in Marlene’s case, not until after her death. The emotional toll Dietrich paid for her estrangement has never been satisfactorily explored until now.

Through the candid recollections of Dietrich, by this time too old to care about the effect her words might have on the living, and Lemper’s masterful interpretation of the songs Dietrich made famous, among them gems by Dietrich’s chief collaborator Frederic Hollaender, including Illusions, Boys in the Backroom and Lola, the many layers of Marlene are peeled back: screen siren (or was she in fact a Hydra?), chanteuse and famed cabaret artiste, but also emigrée, a captain in the US army, humanitarian, and rapacious lover of both men and women.

In an exceptional performance and an outrageous act of necromancy Lemper fully occupies Marlene’s complicated femininity and sexuality. Lemper’s only difficulty, as an exceptionally fine and distinct singer herself, is to fully inhabit Dietrich’s limited contralto on songs more associated with male singers, such as One for my Baby (And One More for the Road).

The show, simply staged among packing cases synonymous with a life lived on the move, and backed by Vana Gierig’s excellent band, opens with Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Such is the directness of Lemper’s lament you suspect only she knows the answer, but is at its most moving when Marlene/ Ute sings in her native German, or in her adopted French.

I suspect there wasn’t a dry eye in the house as Marlene brought the first half of the show to a close, her face to the wall, as she sang Marie, Marie, although with tears in my eyes myself, I’m probably not the most reliable witness.

Throughout, Lemper directly and indirectly reminds us not just of Marlene’s heroism in standing up to the Nazis, but of the internationalism she shared with Lemper and without which neither star could shine quite so brightly.

On no account, says Lemper, must we allow neo-nationalism to turn the sky black. There is so much more to Rendezvous with Marlene than mere storytelling and songs, but if that’s all you desire then what stories, and what songs they are!

Keep an eye open for the return of Rendezvous with Marlene, planned for later this year, and you’ll be certain to find yourself Falling in Love Again.

Astonishing.

Click here to see article online

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Publication: The Gay UK
Date: May 18, 2019
By: Sasha De Suinn

‘Falling in Love Again…’ an entranced Sasha de Suinn reviews Ute Lemper’s sold-out cabaret show Rendezvous with Marlene at the Arcola Theatre, London.

Where were you when Princess Di died?

Shocked, indifferent or simply unborn then? Like the Twin Towers, Di’s death instantly branded itself into cultural awareness worldwide, becoming a cultural landmark of collective disbelief. Still – if not quite on such an exalted plane – artistic earthquakes also create an enduring, seismic blip in public adoration and memorable regard. But forget the pointlessly premature – if still shocking – deaths of musical prodigies Prince, Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson; they’re the negative downside of cultural lightning brilliantly caught in a bottle. Ah, but don’t despair – there’s always light in the darkness, a Dumbledore to every Voldemort! Why, given a convenient TARDIS like every cosy, pansexual Time Lord, who wouldn’t want to witness Maria Callas, Judy Garland and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust shows at their iconic, history-making peak?

Still, those moments, if rare, continue to persist as thrilling possibilities. And culturally – right here and right now – we’re incandescently privileged to witness Ute Lemper’s totally game-changing Rendezvous With Marlene. The work of a simply superlative artist at the top of her game, it’s a fearless exploration of Dietrich’s doubts, regrets and shockingly raw humanity.

Like the finest, vintage Krug champagne – with all its’ attendant depth, resonance and complexity of flavour – Rendezvous has intensely benefitted from its’ long, thirty-year gestation in Ute’s mind.

While playing Sally Bowles in a stage version of Cabaret in Dusseldorf back in 1992 when she was 24, Ute wrote a postcard to the 88-year-old Dietrich apologising for the constant barrage of spurious comparisons lazy journalists were drawing between the two artists. To call those journalists merely misguided would be ridiculously kind; they were wildly inaccurate. Where Dietrich was breezily, bisexually promiscuous, Ute was married with children; where Dietrich barely strayed beyond performing a narrow repertoire of expected classics, Ute’s range – including tackling songs by Nick Cave and Tom Waits – was eclecticism personified; and finally, while Dietrich stage’s act and barely-passable ‘singing’ remained essentially static and she explores no other creative pathways privately, Ute was a first-class chanteuse, actress and dancer, painting and song-writing in her precious downtime.

Very different women, then, despite the most blatantly obvious, shared physical characteristics; blonde hair and shapely bodies. Still, both had a shrewd grasp of the human impact of restrictive politics – as in Dietrich’s profound disgust towards the Nazis, while Ute – pleasingly in an era of blanket, Trump idiocies – comes across as an electrifying, pro-choice Valkyrie at the Arcola, sharing Dietrich’s passion for strong, female self-determinism.

Framed as a post-modern metafiction – Ute switching characters back and forth between herself and Dietrich, and exploring Dietrich’s memories in character en route – Rendezvous is almost an act of secular worship in performing, spontaneously eliciting an aura of hushed, quasi-religious devotion from the audience. Faultlessly exhibiting the high-functioning playfulness of an Alpha-class empath, Ute is so sensitive to nuance she virtually leads the audience en mass to the emotional mountaintops of Dietrich’s revelations. Throughout, Ute exhibits two exceptional qualities wholly lacking from the frenzied, truncated idiocy that passes as modern stage direction; dignity and restraint.

Surely a reigning role-model of liquid-boned finesse, Ute’s slightest, rippling gesture speaks emotional volumes, and she has the incalculable, expressive gift of making even the most chronically over-exposed lyrics imaginable –Blowing In The Wind, anyone? – resonate with the shocking, public poignancy of Christine Blasey Ford testimony against the vile Brett Kavanaugh.

A sheer master-class in memorial intimacy, stagecraft and the taut, emotional fury of suppressed pain and regret, Rendezvous With Marlene is an astounding instance of spiritual ventriloquism, of one acclaimed performer so prepared to relinquish egotism she’ll voluntarily become the mouthpiece of another.

Utterly in tune with our present, diversity zeitgeist, Ute’s tribute is not only pansexual, acknowledging Marlene’s female and male lovers, but also – going even further than Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years– transageist, as a youthful, ebullient Ute assumes the serene gravitas of Dietrich herself. Masterly? Of course; and – by a huge margin – simply the finest act of sustained, emotional intensity and fearless self-revelation I’ve ever seen. Ute – like Bowie, Callas and Garland before her – is in an unprecedented class of her own.

Click here to read this article on The Gay UK website.

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Photo Credit: Roy Tan


May. 17, 2019  

Olivier Award-winning Ute Lemper will bring her one woman show Rendezvous with Marlene, celebrating the life of Marlene Dietrich, to Arcola Theatre. The show runs 14-19 May, and marks Ute Lemper‘s first major London performance since Cadogan Hall in 2017.

Ute Lemper said today, “I know that London loved Marlene! She said ‘my soul goes to France, my heart to England and to Germany goes my dead body.’ The British had an open loving heart for Marlene Dietrich. Rendezvous with Marlene means a lot to me – it is my personal homage to that great lady. There are many portraits of Marlene out there, but this one is coming from my heart. Audiences are in for an incredible story; history, fate, courage, style, politics, glamour and sex, talent and a huge career.”

Arcola Artistic Director Mehmet Ergen said, “This is a rare opportunity see Ute Lemper, my all-time cabaret artist in her most intimate performance in her most natural environment- the unique, distressed space of the Arcola. This is an amazing opportunity to witness Ute and Marlene close-up, and one that Arcola are proud to offer.”

Ute Lemper‘s career is vast and varied. She has made her mark on the stage, in films, in concert and as a unique recording artist on more than 30 CDs over 30 years of career. She has been universally praised for her interpretations of Berlin Cabaret Songs, the works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and the Chansons of Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, Jacques Prevert, Nino Rota, Astor Piazzolla many others and also her own compositions, as well as her portrayals in musicals and plays on Broadway, in Paris, Berlin and in London’s West End.She won Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role as Velma Kelly in Chicago in 1998, and the 1987 Molière Award for Best Newcomer for her performance as Sally Bowles in the original Paris production of Cabaret.

Click here to read the article online, and see some extra photos.

https://www.arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/ute-lemper-rendezvous-with-marlene/

 

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Photo Brigitte Dummer

Broadway World
by Gary Naylor
May. 16, 2019

“A huge thrill to see and hear Ute up close in so intimate a space, and to witness her evocation of Marlene with such skill and humanity”

Too old to pursue men – and women – (not that many needed much chasing), too reclusive to light up the town and too curious not to respond, Marlene (we don’t need the second name do we?) phones Ute Lemper and talks. Ute had written the letter that prompted the call and it is that (one-sided) conversation that prompts the show.

31 years on, Ute is no longer the ultra-talented toast of the Parisian stage, but a global star of stage and screen, the early empathy with Marlene matured into the raw material for this one-two-woman show. Sometimes Ute is Ute, but mostly she is Marlene, on the phone, telling stories, being Marlene.

We hear of the lovers of course, the pleasure of the senses and the pain of separation. We hear of her almost lifelong refusal to “love” and how that drove an unbreachable rift between her and her daughter. We hear of her longing for Heimat – a Germany that disappeared forever when the Weimar Republic was crushed. And we hear of her courage, moral and physical, in the war years, living alongside the soldiers fighting on the front lines. Maybe you didn’t need brains to be an anti-Nazi (as she asserted), but you sure needed heart.

Punctuating this life like no other, Ute sings the songs that marked such times, 30 years and more of performing vesting the words and music with a depth surely no other singer could mine. She gets super support from Vana Gierig’s excellent band, mixed to exactly the right level to balance the vocals.

What songs they are! From the seething anger of Pete Seeger’s “Where have all the flowers gone?” to the Weimarish satire of Hollaender and Spolianksy to the Hollywood numbers of Johnny Mercer. The songs may be (as the kids say these days) totally owned by Ute, but they are also totally Marlene – and, one thinks, such was the fate of everything she touched.

It’s a huge thrill to see and hear Ute up close in so intimate a space, and to witness her evocation of Marlene with such skill and humanity. Marlene and Ute are both examples of an internationalism that is in retreat, a love of Heimat balanced by an embrace of other cultures. And if we can’t listen to the warnings of where such developments lead from two Germans, then who will we listen to?

Rendezvous with Marlene is at the Arcola Theatre until 19 May.

Click here to read this review on Broadway World
See also BWW interviews Ute Lemper.

 

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Publication: The American
Reviewed by Jarlath O’Connell
Published on May 16, 2019

Ute Lemper, who has headlined the great theatres of Berlin, Vienna and Paris amongst others has finally made it to Dalston. In a coup, this intimate theatre, located in London’s hipsterville, has wooed the great German chanteuse to present the first UK performances of this new and very personal homage to her fellow country-woman Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992).

It is based on a 3-hour phone call Lemper had with Dietrich in 1988. After receiving the French Molière award for her role in Cabaret in Paris, Lemper had sent a postcard to Marlene, essentially apologizing for all the media attention drawing comparisons between them. Ute, at 24, was just setting out whilst Marlene, then 87, was looking back on a career which defines the term legend. By then she was a recluse, holed up in the Avenue de Montaigne, with the telephone being her only connection to the world.

Lemper has form of course in performing Dietrich’s songs, has recorded the works of Weill and Hollaender, and is the pre-eminent interpreter of these great Weimar composers.

Lemper never tries mere impersonation, she’s too good for that. She is always totally herself but of course she has the look and the attitude right down. She has also gathered round her a quartet of great musicians led by Vana Gierig on piano. They add a joyous country twang to ‘The Boys in the Backroom’, and ‘One for My Baby’ while ‘When the World Was Young’ are re-invented afresh in lush, beautifully textured arrangements.

Between the songs (and they’re all there) Lemper goes into some detail about Dietrich’s politics and life story. Being rejected when she first returned to Germany in 1960 cut her deeply. After that she said she’d return only in a coffin. When this did happen, in 1992, the contemporary neo-Nazis left off stink bombs at the graveyard and other civic memorials, sadly, had to be curtailed. It wasn’t really until her centenary in 2001 that she finally was given the respect she was due in her home country.

By the late ‘60s she was touring the world with Burt Bacharach and she even rode the Flower Power boom which Lemper illustrates with salty bilingual versions of Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and Dylan’s ‘Blowinin the Wind’. Considering her first breakthrough in The Blue Angel was in 1930 this was quite a career arc.

Lemper reminds us too what a ground breaking figure Dietrich was. She had an open marriage, was openly bisexual and had affairs with all her leading men – plus a few female co-stars – as well as practically all the leading cultural and literary figures of her era. As a style icon she smashed all conventions, devising a fantastic androgynous look supported by exquisite tailoring. She understood branding before the word was invented and Billy Wilder claimed she knew more about lighting than any cinematographer. Highly educated and intensely articulate she knew what she wanted and she got it.

Her often bohemian lifestyle had a curious counterpoint though, in that she had a streak of Prussian discipline running through her. She also loved to cook and clean and mother people, which she did with Piaf for example, but she soon came to realise that Piaf couldn’t be saved from herself.

Lemper’s slow rendition of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is particularly heart breaking when she puts it in the context Marlene’s great lost love – the French movie star Jean Gabin. How, despite all the lovers, she held a candle for him right to her dying day is a touching reminder of her softer side.

Lemper’s show is a feast for the fans and a brilliant introduction for those who might not know her. Like a fine wine Lemper improves with age and has grown into this material. This, no doubt, will travel far and wide and should not be missed.

Let Jean Cocteau have the final word: “Ah, Marlene Dietrich, a name that starts like a kiss and ends like a whip”.

Click here for the online review