Publication: Financial Times US
By: Arwa Haider
DAte: 9 Apr 2024

Ute Lemper is touring with a show that reflects on her stellar career as a singer, performer and cabaret icon. She talks to Arwa Haider

In the twilight haze of New York’s 54 Below club, it’s hard to tell what time it is. Onstage, the German singer, performer and cabaret icon Ute Lemper is sound-checking Rendezvous With Marlene, a show based on her late-1980s encounter with an octogenarian Marlene Dietrich. The story is unusual; the scene feels especially surreal, because I’m watching via a transatlantic video call to Lemper’s mobile — but it’s enchanting to witness her channel the elegant yet embittered Dietrich, singing classics including “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”. At the same time, she sounds unmistakably Lemper: wry, alluring, icy yet incandescent.“

“I always wanted to use singing, performing and telling a story as a profound identification with my feeling of life, my own outrage, hurt, hope, happiness,” says Lemper, now offstage. “I never wanted to imitate anyone; I was way too full of my own passions.”

Lemper, 60, grew up in Münster, Germany, in what she describes as a conservative home (her parents were musical but prioritised their “normal jobs”). By her teens, Lemper was singing in a jazz-rock group before studying dance in Cologne, then drama at Vienna’s Max Reinhardt Seminary. In Paris in 1987, her lead performance in Cabaret won major accolades, with many reviewers likening Lemper to Dietrich. The rising star wrote to the reclusive grande dame, apologising for these bold comparisons; unexpectedly, Dietrich phoned Lemper and they spoke at length.

“It inspired this work about human contact: between the inexperienced youth and the old experienced woman who was jaded yet had so much to say,” explains Lemper.

In the decades since Dietrich’s call, Lemper’s career has encompassed Weimar-era cabaret as the eminent modern interpreter of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s songbook, musical theatre, including her award-winning role in the London and Broadway productions of Chicago, movies (she was a heavily pregnant fashionista in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter), and more. She has been both maverick and muse; her 2000 album Punishing Kiss featured songs written for her by the likes of Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Scott Walker. Her delivery remains deliciously sharp, but her approach has become more reflective, and her upcoming Time Traveller tour highlights her creative range.

Time Traveller shares its name with Lemper’s latest album, as well as her autobiography (an English translation is planned). Both the record and the book draw from her archives; she found herself updating early compositions and revisiting a memoir she’d been commissioned to write in her twenties.
“The first 10 years of my career were overwhelmingly intense,” she says. “I was still a nomad, running from city to city, under the pressure of this enormous career. And there was the backdrop of extreme metamorphosis in Germany, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the new Europe breaking open…”

While Lemper has been settled in New York for some years, Berlin has never left her: “There was a rebel in me that could very much be inspired by this place that was torn into two halves in the middle of East Germany — the Berlin of this anarchic, rebellious spirit, where I really had a wake-up call as a young German, an artist and a woman.”

It sounds as if Lemper has always been punk at heart. She smiles: “I didn’t need the piercings and tattoos… but I felt like kind of an outcast. I had my music to escape — and the families I found in the theatres: exotic people, paradise birds who made the night the realm of fulfilment. This piece of Berlin stayed with me, always this realism and expressionism, when I was Sally Bowles [in Cabaret] in Paris, when I was Velma Kelly [in Chicago] in London or on Broadway.”

Berlin also endures in Lemper’s fantastically vivid interpretations of the Weimar-era collaborations of Brecht and Weill, including cabaret songs from The Threepenny Opera and Happy End. Her versions have been celebrated since her debut solo album, Ute Lemper Singt Kurt Weill (apparently Dietrich was quite proprietorial about this during their call), and she has proved a modern champion for this material.

Still, she says, “In the beginning, the Weill Foundation was a bit of a bummer because they put so many limitations on things. We called them the Weill Police. In 1987 in Berlin, I was recording in the studio, and there was a member of the Kurt Weill Foundation in the singing booth with me, their finger on the score saying: ‘Do not speak this. This has to be sung.’ I’d still put intention into the singing. But obviously, I didn’t like the authoritarian control.”

Why does Lemper think contemporary artists and audiences are still attracted to cabaret? “This original material from Weimar was so important: these repertoires about homosexuality, freedom of [female] emancipation, freedom of choice, political corruption… Cabaret is light entertainment, but it taps into all the social taboos. People love to go out for dinner and drinks, and to watch this form that pushes boundaries. Cabaret can go much further than musical theatre can.”

Musical theatre blockbusters hold little appeal for Lemper nowadays. “Sometimes I had issues working with directors, when I had to obey something that I didn’t feel,” she says. “I even struggled with Chicago, because I found the part of Velma like a slapstick caricature of what I was supposed to be. Although I loved the really strong athletic dancing of the Bob Fosse theatre.”

It has always been extraordinary to watch Lemper’s powerfully slinky take on classic Fosse moves. “I don’t know; right now, I need a new hip,” she laughs ruefully. “It demanded such physical strength to do these eight shows a week.”

Lemper’s tour and album allow her to revisit all these parts of her career, taking inspiration from decades of experience and unexpected connections, creating work that she describes as “a labour of love”. “I was not ever planning my future,” she says. “I was not even expecting a future. It took me a while to find my world.”

Ute Lemper’s UK tour begins on April 24 at Bristol St George’s. ‘Time Traveller’ is out now, utelemper.com