News

by on


Picture: Roy Tan

Publication:  Onstage, Review
Date: Wednesday, 15 May, 2019
By: Scott Matthewman

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous with Marlene continues at the Arcola Theatre, London until 19 May 2019.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In the late 1980s, German actress Ute Lemper was playing the role of Sally Bowles in a Parisian production of Cabaret, for which the French press dubbed her “la nouvelle Marlene”.

Lemper dismisses the comparison with Marlene Dietrich lightly, suggesting it’s a journalistic shorthand due to both actresses being German. But there is more to it: there is a definite physical resemblance, and a similar sense of mischief behind the eyes.

After Lemper wrote what amounted to a fan letter to Dietrich, who at that time lived as a recluse in Paris, she was surprised one evening to receive a phone call in her hotel from the woman herself. Whatever that telephone conversation actually contained, Lemper has fictionalised it into a full-length show, examining Dietrich’s life’s and loves and performing songs from her extensive catalogue.

As Lemper illustrates, Dietrich’s career started in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, a time when Germany was one of the most socially progressive. That era helped produce what Lemper’s Marlene describes as a “woman of the future”: unashamedly sex-positive, revelling in a series of relationships with men and women.

But the shadow of the Nazi regime fell long upon her life after that. She emigrated to Hollywood following the success of her small role in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Of a move which was not popular with the German populace, she says, “they didn’t forgive me – but I didn’t forgive them” for bringing Hitler to power.

By framing the evening as the reminiscences of an 89-year-old Dietrich, Lemper allows for the selection of songs which fit the mood of the recollection rather than just the time period. Marlene’s anti-war sentiments are thus expressed through bilingual versions of Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and Dylan’s seminal ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

Lest that give an impression that this is an overly serious evening, Lemper brings out Dietrich’s wicked sense of humour throughout. In cabaret numbers such as Cole Porter’s ‘Laziest Gal in Town’ and ‘The Boys in the Backroom’ (written by Frank Loesser to music by Friedrich Hollaender and a huge hit for Dietrich after she sang it in the Western film Destry Rides Again) we see both Dietrich and Lemper at the top of their game, for it becomes impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins.

And while many of the reminiscences that Lemper puts in Dietrich’s mouth, from meeting director Billy Wilder and discovering his collection of priceless paintings, lying dusty and rotting in his apartment, to a series of dalliances (“JFK was boring – I did prefer his father”), these work best when they lead in to the sort of torch song that Lemper makes look so easy.

A reminiscence about Dietrich’s year-long affair with Edith Piaf forms the fulcrum of a series of French language numbers, allowing a softness to Lemper’s timbre that is not often in evidence in her performance of Weill numbers for which she is so renowned.

The music is dominated, though, by compositions by Friedrich Hollaender, from ‘Lola’ and ‘Black Market’ to perhaps Dietrich’s most famous number, ‘Falling in Love Again’.

Dating back to that debut in The Blue Angel, a role Lemper has herself played in a stage adaptation, it demonstrates how these two German actresses share more than just a German heritage. La nouvelle Marlene, indeed.

Click here to see this review online.

by on

Publication : The Gay UK
Date: May 14, 2019
By: Sasha De Suinn

Sasha de Suinn interviews Ute Lemper, the world-famous – and hugely LGBT friendly – jazz and chanson singer on her upcoming, sold-out show – Rendezvous, with Marlene, at London’s Arcola Theatre

What makes a killer diva? Is it surviving the frenzied, hot-pout hurricanes routinely weathered by the strutting queens in Pose?
Or – arguably better – surviving every possible shift in the facile, pop-trash demographic spoon-fed by reigning low-brow Simon Cowell?

Perhaps, but rarer still is one essential ingredient; jaw-dropping talent.

Not that England’s particularly thin on the ground in that respect; for every ridiculously over-praised whiner like Celine Dion or Madonna, we have a Shirley Bassey, a Dusty Springfield, an Adele and Amy Winehouse. Still, as shockingly good as those artists are, the most revered, rarefied divas – which must, without doubt, include opera queen supreme Maria Callas and legendary French chansonnier Edith Piaf – both transcend and encapsulate their formative cultures.

In brief, they’re shockingly, almost dangerously definitive, iconically flash-freezing the cultural mountain peaks they’ve chosen to climb and conquer… […/more]

Click here to read this fabulous comprehensive Interview online.

by on

WATCH THIS!
A fantastic 16-minute London Live TV interview with the legendary Ute Lemper about the sold-out UK premiere of “Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene” at Arcola Theatre all this week

The Olivier award winning cabaret star Ute Lemper is bringing her one-woman show Rendezvous with Marlene to the capital for one week only.

The show is based on a three hour phone call that took place between Ute and Marlene Dietrich, more than 3 decades ago.

That conversation is now being shared with audiences, through an evening of music and performance.

Rendezvous with Marlene Dalston’s Arcola Theatre 14-19th of May

Click here to view the online interview.

by on

“I go back and forth into her skin throughout the show. I am being Marlene, and then again I am Ute, telling her story, and then again Marlene. It’s a really great retrospective, a very personal homage from me”

Published: May 1, 2019
Publication:
By: Cary Gee

Thirty years ago, singer and musical theatre star Ute Lemper shared a three-hour telephone call with film legend Marlene Dietrich.

The call inspired Lemper’s latest one-woman show, Rendezvous with Marlene, which Lemper is bringing to London. Cary Gee asked her what prompted her telephone call and what fans can expect from her new show

“I was in Paris, in 1998, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Dietrich was 87 years old. I was 24. The newspapers at the time wrote that I was the ‘new Marlene’. I called her to apologise for the comparison to this legend.”

Why did she feel the need to apologise?

“I didn’t have to. But I felt so humbled. I just wanted to express my admiration and tell her how she had inspired generations of women, and to thank her for the political and moral courage she had shown during the war. So I called her, not really expecting an answer. Months later her spies in the theatre business tracked me down, she called me and we had a long conversation about a lot of things.”

But that was 30 years ago. Why write the show now?

“I kept the conversation in a secret compartment of my heart, only accessing it sporadically over the intervening decades until last year I thought: ‘I’m now old enough, I’ve been through so many rollercoasters myself. Like her I’m an ex-pat living in New York, with an international career. I’ve had so much craziness, adventure and sadness in my life I thought maybe now I can finally access part of this woman’s depth, her life and sorrow.”

It must have been a rather surreal experience, chatting to an old lady she had never met before but knew so much about.

“Yes. When we spoke she was in the very last chapter of her life. She was completely isolated. She hadn’t seen her daughter for a long time, after she’d written a nasty biography. She talked about her incredible love for the poet Rilke. 

She told me she just wanted to talk. I was curious but careful not to ask too many questions. The conversation was more of a monologue! Most important was the emotional transparency she had. Obviously she was very old, and old people are often very uncensored in their remarks. She was very bitter, melancholic and incredibly sentimental about Germany and her broken relationship with her home country.”

I ask Ute, who has lived in New York for many years, how her own relationship with Germany is.

“It’s very good now. I’ve just performed this show in all the big cities in Germany, including Berlin of course, which was the most meaningful place to perform. The piece really goes into her relationship with her home, but also talks about nationalism, the Nazis, extremism. When she was buried in Berlin in ’92 that was the moment I was playing her part in The Blue Angel. She died ten days before our opening night. A celebration of her life was planned, which we then had to cancel because neo-Nazis threatened to disrupt the performance. This was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Nazis were on the rise again after the loss of their identity. It was an incredible cycle of events, that at this very moment I was playing her role, in Berlin.”

I suggest that Ute, who has performed many of Marlene’s most famous stage roles, and sung many of the songs Marlene helped to make famous, must feel more than the usual connection to the role she is inhabiting?

“I am going back and forth into her skin throughout the show. I am being Marlene, and then again I am Ute, telling her story, and then again being Marlene. There are great physical numbers. We go through her time at the Blue Angel, then her great Hollywood years. There are songs by Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and Friedrich Hollaender, a great Jewish immigrant from Berlin. We go on the road with Marlene and Burt Bacharach. She was on the road with Burt for fifteen years after Hollywood decided that, at the age of 50, she was too old to be in movies anymore. It’s just a really great retrospective, a very personal homage from me, telling her story in a time warp.”

I’m interested to know how this modern-day gay icon feels about playing an original gay icon, and indeed what, in Ute’s opinion, makes a good gay icon. She pauses to consider the question. I’m worried I might have offended her. But no.

“It’s a person of strength, emancipation, independence, seduction. At the same time masculine and feminine. It’s a person of the future basically. A person of courage, outside traditional laws and conventions of gender attraction. That’s the thing about Marlene. She appeared at a time when women were not allowed to have the last word. She was progressive, completely emancipated, she was not afraid to say what she thought. Ever. She thought like a boss, and acted like a lady. She was masculine in her style. She was bisexual. She had male and female lovers. She was in an open marriage, a free spirit. Completely polygamous. Insatiable!”

Of the many aspects of Dietrich’s life Ute explores in Rendezvous, is there one she admires above all others?

“That she stood up to Hitler and fought for the Americans. She had to deal with incredible pain, hurt and dilemma. She remained an outcast in Germany many years after the war. She said that the Nazis continued to cast long shadows. Because of them Germany rejected her. This was the most heart-breaking thing for Marlene. Everything else she regarded as natural emancipation. She was one of the first people to rise above normal gender definitions. She broke all those traditions.”

It almost sounds like Lemper has been waiting her whole life to play Marlene.

“I am the one holding up her banner, and telling her stories. The continuation of her voice. I make sure her stories are heard again in the new millennium. I would say I’m the most authentic person to show people again who she was.”

How does Ute hope audiences will feel after seeing her show?

“Audiences will be intrigued, they will enjoy the musical performances, but above all they will be touched. I’ve performed the show in three languages (German, French, English) and when it gets to the most heart-breaking parts of her story you can hear a pin drop. Audiences everywhere react pretty much the same way but of course in Germany it’s especially touching. They are liberating themselves from the shadow of the Nazis.”

Ute has long been recognized as one of the greatest interpreters of song, particularly those from her native Germany. Does she actually prefer to sing other people’s songs, rather than her own?

“I love presenting songs in Marlene’s style. Her instrument was very limited. I start out as Marlene in a very simplistic way, but then I go into Ute. There’s a constant back and forth between Marlene and Ute. I always take a step further interpreting her songs in my own way.”

Would Marlene herself have enjoyed Ute’s take on her life?

“I think she would appreciate it, knowing that I was holding up her torch.”

London is almost sold out. But there is some good news for people unlucky enough not to have a ticket to the show. Ute is already planning to return to London in the autumn, to perform the show at a bigger venue. And if you can’t wait that long to eavesdrop on her conversation with Marlene, she is currently putting the finishing touches to a CD featuring 20 of the best songs from the show.

Rendezvous with Marlene is at the Arcola Theatre., London 14-19 May and then tours Europe. 

Click here to read the article on PrideLife