by on


Photo: David Andrako

Publication: Southside Advertiser
Date: 8 February, 2020
By: Tom King

Ute Lemper with “Rendezvous with Marlene” at The Queen’s Hall Edinburgh tonight was one of those shows that when leaving you said to yourself, “I’m glad I was in the audience for this one”.  To be clear to anyone planning to see this show at one of its tour dates, this is not a standard Ute Lemper in concert show, but a very theatrical story celebrating in words, music and song the life of the legendary Marlene Dietrich.

This production is based on a 3-hour 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.   Here we have a very powerful story of one legend, Marlene, in the solitary twilight years of her career and life touching the life of another artiste just beginning her own journey to international stardom.  The way that people and events over the years begin to interweave into each other between Marlene and Ute is a story in itself and one that continues long after Marlene Dietrich’s own death.  As Ute tells us at one point, it has taken her 33 years to feel that this is the right time to make this production and let Marlene speak again on stage, and as a one woman work of theatre, this is an outstanding performance from Ute.  This show was a rare chance to see an intimate, powerful and dramatic performer at her very best, one who can captivate an audience that is silently awaiting her next word or song.  Ute Lemper is not only a performer who understands the power of theatre, but the very power of the cabaret of the Weimar Republic that Marlene Dietrich emerged from.

I have to admit to having missed much of Marlene Dietrich as a live performance artist as I was always more aware of Marlene the film star, and my main memory of her is in one of her very late and very dramatic Hollywood movie roles – A Touch of Evil (1958 co-starring Orson Welles).  This show from Ute Lemper is really not concentrating on either the cabaret star or the film star, but the woman that was Marlene, and here we get a small glimpse of someone always prepared to stand up and be heard whenever she felt her voice was needed to speak out about injustice and intolerance anywhere that she saw it.  That voice made her at times hugely unpopular with many people, and during the years of Nazi rule in Germany, put her in a potentially very dangerous personal position.

“Rendezvous with Marlene” is a story that makes no attempt to gloss over or ignore the rise to power of Hitler and the German Nazi Party, or the forever infamous events that followed, including concentration camps and “The Final Solution”.  Here, it is clear that Ute is both following in Marlene’s footsteps, and the very traditions of German cabaret itself, to constantly challenge those in authority and hold them accountable for their actions.

What about the music though, how does that work in this production?  Well, as always, anything that Ute Lemper sings is going to be unique and full of power and passion, and that was obvious from the opening song – “Falling In Love Again”.  I am deliberately only going to mention a few of the songs in this show, and the reason for that is that so much of the power of these songs is in exactly where and in what context Ute has used them; here dialogue and song should not be viewed as separate things.  I’m giving no secrets away though in telling you that classic Ute Lemper performances of “Lili Marlene” and “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” are here.

For me though, the outstanding performance of the evening from Ute Lemper was a song that I know Marlene Dietrich performed, but one  that I always associate with Jacues Brel – his wonderful, “Ne me quitte pas”.  Here, when Ute sings this song, and when it is used in the show, is for me as good an example of any that the re-written, and for me far lighter,  story in the English language version of “If You Go Away” simply would not have had the power or emotional resonance needed for this moment.

If you missed “Rendezvous with Marlene”, try and catch up with the show somewhere on its tour and discover not only the presence of Ute Lemper as a performer, but what genuine cabaret, and not what we too often accept as modern cabaret, is capable of giving an audience, and how forcing us to look not only at our past, but our own actions can maybe prevent us making the same mistakes again.  Sadly though, nearly 100 years on now from the cabaret world of Marlene Dietrich, every intolerance of one person to another that Marlene was speaking out against seems not only to still be with us, but in danger of raising its head once more and building new walls.  The people in uniforms have just become people in smart suits, and their words of “divide and conquer” are all too still the same.  We still need people like Ute Lemper who are not prepared to look the other way and willing to stand up, be counted, and to speak out loudly against all injustice wherever she encounters it.

Click here to read on Southside Advertiser

by on


Photo: David Andrako

Publication: ReviewSphere
Date: 9 February, 2020
By: Peter Callaghan

When an artist instructs her drummer to “pull the plug” you’d be forgiven for thinking that their gig is going south faster than Ruth Davidson’s taxi to the House of Lords. But Ute Lemper’s cry from the stage was in reference to an errant smoke machine which brought a blast of Storm Ciara in from the cold to fill The Queen’s Hall with a Hound of the Baskervilles mist.

Plug duly pulled (not to mention technicians duly eyeballed) it was back to business: the exceptional Lemper’s spellbinding homage to Marlene Dietrich inspired by a late-night phone call, over thirty years ago, between the rising star Lemper whose Moliere Award-winning performance as Sally Bowles earned her the title of “the new Marlene” and “a woman of the future” in the shape of the enigmatic Dietrich who had been holed up in her Paris apartment for over a decade.

The call itself prompted by Lemper’s letter to apologise for the comparison and thank her for being an inspiration.

Based on the titular “rendezvous”, which is given added spice by recollections from one of Dietrich’s legions of lovers (of both persuasions) film director Billy Wilder, and shaped by the reclusive star’s preference for asking rather than answering provocative questions, the show isn’t so much a conversation, more a one-way purging of the soul in which Dietrich not only reflects upon her life and career, but more importantly invites Lemper and the audience to never forget the horrors of war.

Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and Bob Dylan’s The Answer, My Friend, Is Blowin’ In The Wind bookmarking the concert to perfection.

Having publicly renounced her German citizenship in revulsion at the rise of Nazism, Dietrich parked thoughts of killing Hitler with a poisoned hair needle in favour of supporting the Allied forces by “serving” under many a General. Not to mention politician, writer and movie star. Though Judy Garland proved true to her torch song in being The Man That Got Away.

The real (and perhaps only) love of her life to merit such a description, however, was the French actor Jean Gabin whose absence left her “nursing an empty space in my heart that I cannot fill.” As did her strained relationship with her daughter Maria Riva who later penned an unflattering memoir. Hence Lemper’s initial description of Dietrich as being “sad and bitter”.

Such personal and political strands intertwine to form the golden thread which runs through Lemper’s commanding performance as she owns the stage, the material and her instrument. Proving that her star qualities have not diminished since she shot to fame in the early 80s as a “young and stretchable” Grizabella in the original Vienna production of Cats.

Her performance, together with that of the band (Vana Gierig on piano, Cyril Garac on violin, Matthias Daneck on drums and Romain Lécuyer – when he emerged from the toilet – on bass), drew a standing ovation and many of the songs generated prolonged applause. However, Rendezvous With Marlene is not a typical biographical concert with a formulaic intro and number structure; more a series of dramatic monologues spliced with shards of songs which are so seamlessly bonded to the text that their passing often goes without acknowledgement.

Unlike Dietrich’s whose funeral was tarnished with stink bombs and civic memorials for whom were curtailed by death threats! In stark contrast to her current iconic status which like Lemper’s performance can best be described by the closing lyric of Friedrich Hollaender’s Black Market – “Enjoy my goods, for boy my goods are hot!”

Click here to read the article on ReviewSphere

by on

Publication: Northern Soul
Date: 6 February, 2020
By: Kevin Bourke

★ ★ ★ ★

It was 1987 in Paris and young cabaret performer Ute Lemper was opening as Sally Bowles in the stage musical Cabaret.

The production was a huge success, with Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in the front row on the first night. Many of the show’s rave reviews dubbed Lemper ‘the new Marlene Dietrich’ and, somewhat embarrassed by the comparison, Lemper sent a postcard to her hero, then aged 78 and a recluse in her Paris apartment, essentially apologising for the media hype. Lemper, after all, was just at the beginning of her career in theatre and music, whereas Dietrich could look back on a long, fulfilled life of movies, music, incredible collaborations, love stories and stardom. To her utter astonishment, Lemper recalls that “Marlene rang me, out of the blue, and we had a three hour phone conversation about her career, her love affairs, her songs. I put it away in my memory and rarely talked about it.”

Five years later, Dietrich was dead. But she lives again in Lemper’s enthralling new show Rendezvous With Marlene, inspired by that remarkable conversation. “I decided it was time to give her life again, mixed with my own choices and my own personal experiences,” explains Lemper. “It’s a dialogue between the two of us, and I had to grow to a certain age to capture her bitterness, her craziness, to bring her story back and tell people today how important she was.

“She was a woman of the future in the 1920s, in the 1930s, and the 1960s and she still is today. She broke the rules. She hated authority and autocrats. She was against male domination of society. She was androgynous in her style. She was very much the boss and absolutely sexy. It was a new aesthetic at the time. She was equally attracted to both sexes, and slept with virtually everyone she worked with, men or women.”

All of these things, as well as a virulent hatred of the Nazis which led to her exile to Hollywood and a whole new career there collaborating with the likes of Billy Wilder and Hitchcock, as well as fervently supporting the Allies’ war efforts, are touched on in this fascinating, enlightening, intense, often moving, and always entertaining two and a half hour show. Adeptly supported by a four-piece ensemble of keyboard, violin, upright bass and drums, Lemper performs most of the songs you might expect, including Just a Gigolo, One For My Baby, The Boys in the Backroom, Lola, and, of course, Lili Marleen (Lili Marlene). Her performance is exceptional, aided by, like Dietrich, a fluency in English and French, as well as their native German, but this is much more than a mere imitation; this is clarification of the themes of loneliness, tragedy, love and friendship that informed Dietrich’s choices. Equally, tales involving such familiar names as Wilder, Burt Bacharach, Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and many others become far more than just showbiz anecdotes in this superb tribute to one astonishing woman from another.

Click here to read the article on Northern Soul

by on


Photo: MaxMara

Publication: GScene
Date: 6 Feb 2020
By: Brian Butler

From the moment the languid full-throated bluesy voice sings Falling In Love Again you know that the next 150 minutes in the company of performer Ute Lemper and subject Marlene Dietrich is going to be pure gold – and so it is.

Supported by keyboards, double bass, violin and drums Miss Lemper recreates a phone conversation she had with the reclusive octogenarian more than 30 years ago.

Marlene was a phone addict – calling the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders to give them the benefit of her advice. The show’s premise is based solidly in Ute’s recollections of her 3-hour conversation which ranged over happiness in sexual encounters to anger and sadness about the rise of the Nazis.

The 20-something rising star had been dubbed “ The new Marlene “ by the French press after her stage opening in Cabaret and the old superstar was clearly intrigued. Ute tells us that Marlene was a woman of the future with a message to give to all of us – the need to stop asking questions about the past in order to make a better future.

Marlene declares “ If I had my life again I would live it all the same , except I’d start earlier.”

What Ute gives us is a picture of a sad and funny, highly sexed, amazingly talented woman and she cleverly weaves appropriate songs into the narrative – such as the deeply-throated Just a Gigolo.

Her time with composer Burt Bacharach led her to Vegas , represented here by the drunkard’s lament One For My Baby, where Lemper seems to hang onto the notes in a vain attempt at keeping a grip on reality.

But the central phone conversation is no interview as Marlene says abruptly “ I don’t want to answer questions , I want to talk … about myself. “

The songs are often bitter and sharp – Marlene’s preference was for sad songs – and in Black Market there is a searing level of cynicism in the ruins of post-war Berlin – “ want to buy some illusions – slightly used, almost new ? “ she asks.

And Ute’s great skill is not to impersonate but to inhabit the character – from the bitter Where Have All the Flowers Gone to the deeply emotional Blowin in The Wind. The performer switches effortlessly between 3 women – the 50-something Ute of today, the 20-something aspiring actress and the octogenarian star living in squalor trapped in the prison of her Paris apartment.

There’s much comedy in the night – as when Marlene reels off a list of her lovers – from JFK and his father to Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles and Edith Piaf and Mae West. The only one she admits evaded her clutches was Judy Garland.

But there was only one true love in her life – the French movie star Jean Gabin whom she left but loved for the rest of her life – here brought to musical life in a haunting sometimes semi-whispered version of Ne Me Quitte Pas , which tears at our hearts.

The simple staging is augmented by a few essential props and costumes and it is when Marlene emerges in a glittery golden frock by Dior which she made Hitchcock buy her for the film Stagefright, that she seems to rise and truly glow in her all-important key light on stage.

Ute is every inch the “ new Marlene “ and she brings us a theatrical event that will be talked about for years to come by new generations encountering Dietrich for the first time.

A staggering night of pure-diamond entertainment.

Rendezvous is on tour – see February’s edition of Gscene for Brian Butler’s full-length interview with Ute.

Click here to read the review on GScene

by on


Photo by Lucas Allen

Publication:  Musical Theatre Review
Date: 5 February, 2020
By: Jeremy Chapman

Rendezvous With Marlene: Ute Lemper at the Electric Theatre, Guildford, and on tour until 8 February 2020.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

It was quite a coup for the 180-seater Electric Theatre, not even Guildford’s biggest, to host an international superstar of Ute Lemper’s stature and the New York-based German diva did not disappoint on her short, eight-city UK tour.

An Olivier-award winner in 1998 as Best Actress in a Musical for her sensuous Velma Kelly in the London revival of Chicago – a part which she also enjoyed with great success on Broadway – Lemper brought the art of cabaret to a new peak in a tribute show which has been 32 years in the making.

Back in the late 1980s when she was wowing Paris as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and being hailed as ‘La Nouvelle Dietrich!’, a youthful Lemper wrote to the great Marlene, by then an 87-year-old pain-wracked, whisky-drinking recluse, lonely and alone in her Avenue Montaigne apartment, apologising for daring to be named in the same breath as a showbiz icon and saying what an inspiration she had been.

No reply was expected but when she got back from the theatre, a note from Dietrich awaited her which led to the three-hour telephone conversation with the legend that eventually spawned the current show.

They went back and forth in several languages with Dietrich not shy about relating intimate details of her life to a stranger, not least her 500-plus love affairs with both sexes, naming John Wayne, Yul Brynner, Errol Flynn, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Harlow, Edith Piaf and Mae West among the many who had shared her bed.

She had the ear of presidents too, JFK, who apparently was less impressive in the sack than his father Joe, she conversed with Reagan and Soviet supremo Gorbachev.

They spoke of the Hollywood movies that made Dietrich’s reputation, The Blue Angel and Destry Rides Again, and the songs with which she was so closely associated, ‘Falling in Love Again’, ‘Lili Marleen’ and ‘The Boys in the Backroom’.

Inevitably there was Pete Seeger’s anti-war ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, which Lemper sang in three languages, and ‘Naughty Lola’ for which Lemper blew the trumpet accompaniment vocally.

They spoke of Dietrich’s decision to quit her homeland and work for the US army against the Nazis, of feeding the immigrants in the Hollywood soup kitchens, of entertaining their troops in the trenches – “spending more time on the front lines than Eisenhower” as her movie director pal Billy Wilder put it – and having soldiers  in the boudoir, with a stated preference for generals “because they had softer beds!”

It was Wilder who told her “You don’t have such good legs – it’s just that you know what to do with them!” Not conventionally beautiful, she created an illusion of beauty through her insouciance and glamorous wardrobe.

Often manly in the way she dressed and “a heck of a guy” according to Wilder, she married just the once to Rudolf Sieber – they had a daughter she fell out with – she admitted to only one great love in her life, not Rudy but the great French actor Jean Gabin, who wasn’t “handsome or vain like her Hollywood leading men” but someone she could have a row with, a cigar, a dirty joke and a whisky.

She dumped him when he got serious about marriage – she had a husband and child at the time – and regretted doing so until her dying day.

Hated in wartime by the German people because of her defection to Hollywood, she was  branded a “traitor to the Fatherland” and assailed by placards telling her to “Go Home!”. For many years after the Second World War Dietrich was unwelcome in the country of her birth, but in time they relented and she was buried in her beloved Berlin in 1992.

Lemper told the story exquisitely and sang the songs beautifully, the boisterous ones with punch and flair, the sad ones ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, ‘Just a Gigolo’ and ‘Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind’ bringing a tear or three to the eye.

The Dylan classic ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, a protest song about a different war with that memorable line “How many ears must one person have/before they can hear people cry’” brought the two and a half hour concert to a fitting end.

An extraordinary, unforgettable evening with a sublime artist at the height of her powers and her superb musicians Vana Gierig on piano, Cyril Garac (violin), Romain Lecuyer (bass) and Matthias Daneck (drums).

Rendezvous with Marlene signs off in Edinburgh on Saturday (8 February) before heading to Europe and should on no account be missed.

Click here to read the review online at Musical Theatre Review