Press : VIEWPOINTS – The old and the new guard at 54 Below: UTE LEMPER sings Kurt Weill, ANNA ZAVELSON & HENRY PATTERSON epitomize youthful optimism

by chamaleon on May 29, 2025June 4, 2025

Publication: Interludes
By: drediman
Date: May 29, 2025

Over the past week or so, I’ve augmented my regularly scheduled performing arts programming to take in some wonderful cabaret entertainment at 54 Below. Read on for my thoughts on these nightcaps in “Broadway’s living room” with both the old and the new guard.

*Ute Lemper sings Kurt Weill at 54 Below (photo by Adrian Dimanlig).*

UTE LEMPER SINGS KURT WEILL
54 Below

This week at 54 Below, legendary German cabaret star Ute Lemper is treating her fans to her incomparable renditions of the defiant songs of Kurt Weill (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). Over the years, Lemper has pretty much become the foremost interpreter of the Weill songbook, who this year is celebrating his 125th birthday. Well-researched and gorgeously delivered, the statuesque German beauty captivated the audience with an in-depth overview of Weill’s tumultuous, eventful life alongside her distinctive singing, most of which centered around the composer’s collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (primarily from The Threepenny Opera). Lemper is unique in her ability to get into the guts of songs. Although at times the resulting sound is not pretty in the conventional sense, her guttural, emotionally naked approach creates a pungent atmosphere that few can replicate, which she established right off the bat with “The Bilbao Song” from The Seven Deadly Sins and “Army Song” from The Threepenny Opera. Once Lemper had the audience where she wanted them, she launched into a trenchant take on perhaps the composer’s most famous tune, “Mortitat von Mackie Messer” (also known as “Mack the Knife”). The heart of the show was her devastating, slow-burning account of “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End, which led into a slicing “Pirate Jenny” (again from Threepenny). Other highlights included startling versions of “Youkali”, as well as a pair of standards from the Weill and Ogden Nash collaboration One Touch of Venus (“Stranger Here Myself” and “Speak Low”). Throughout, Lemper was accompanied instinctively on keys by music director Vana Gierig.

*Tedd Firth, Henry Patterson, and Anna Zavelson in “Broadway: The Night Is Young” at 54 Below (photo by Adrian Dimanlig).*

HENRY PATTERSON & ANNA ZAVELSON — BROADWAY: THE NIGHT IS YOUNG
54 Below

Then we have the new guard, as was represented last week by an evening with Henry Patterson and Anna Zavelson (RECOMMENDED) (Zavelson made an exquisite impression in her turn as Clara in the Encores! revival of Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza a few years ago). Fittingly entitled Broadway: The Night Is Young, the one-night-only late show was mostly comprised of Broadway show tunes, albeit in largely non-traditional arrangements (jazz was the prominent mode). Although Patterson and Zavelson are relatively young — both are only in their early twenties — they displayed an impressive knowledge of the Broadway songbook, especially in their spectacularly dense, Moulin Rouge-style love duet mash-up (a whopping twenty songs culled from a wide gamut of musicals). The most radically reconceived songs were a swinging “All I Ask of You” from Phantom and a beguilingly funky “The Beauty Is” from Piazza (it shouldn’t have worked, but it did), as well as an amusing gender-bent “Popular” from Wicked. More straightforward was Patterson’s foray into Sondheim material (e.g., a moving medley of “Loving You” from Passion and “Losing My Mind” from Follies). Also welcome was the duo’s mini-tribute to the late Charles Strouse in the form of their performances of a trio of songs from Annie — “N.Y.C.”, “Maybe”, “I Don’t Need Anything But You”. Throughout, they were the epitome of youthful optimism and exuded easygoing, natural chemistry. Patterson in particular has a charmingly self-possessed demeanor that suggests that he will be a fixture on cabaret stages for years to come. Zavelson, on the other hand, sings like an absolute dream, her pure upper register reminding me of a young Kelli O’Hara. Brilliantly stepping in at the last minute to fulfill music director duties on keys was the great Tedd Firth (although you’d hardly pick up on it if the circumstance wasn’t mentioned).

Press : Photos: See Highlights from UTE LEMPER SINGS KURT WEILL at 54 Below

by chamaleon on May 29, 2025June 4, 2025

Publication: Broadway World
By: Rebecca Kaplan
Date: May. 29, 2025

The unforgettable show continues tonight, 5/29, at 7 pm

A captivating storyteller and historian, Ute Lemper returned to 54 Below on Tuesday May 27, 2025 for a mesmerizing journey through the life and music of Kurt Weill. BroadwayWorld’s Analisa Bell called the show an “unforgettable performance” that highlighted Weill’s prolific work as a composer, as well as his experiences as a Jewish man navigating a world rife with challenges that would seem insurmountable. (Read the full review of the January 2025 show here.) Ute Lemper has been universally praised for her interpretations of Berlin cabaret Songs, the works of Kurt Weill and Berthold 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.

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill will be performed one more time, tonight Thursday May 29 at 7 pm. Tickets are available on 54 Below’s website here.

Find more on Ute Lemper on her website at http://www.utelemper.com/.

Below, see photos from Tuesday’s show snapped by photographer Conor Weiss.

Read the original Broadway World article here.

Press : International star Ute Lemper reimagines the legendary music of Kurt Weill on her new album ‘Pirate Jenny’

by chamaleon on May 27, 2025June 4, 2025

Publication: WBGO
By: Doug Doyle
Date: May 27, 2025

International star, singer and actress Ute Lemper‘s career is vast and varied. The German-born performer, who has lived in New York for many years, has made her mark on the stage, in films, in concert and as a unique recording artist. Lempe has been universally praised for her interpretations of Berlin Cabaret Songs and the works of Kurt Weill, Astor Piazzolla and many others, as well as her own compositions.

Lemper joined WBGO’s Doug Doyle to talk about her latest release and upcoming gigs at 54 Below on May 27 and May 29.

“The evening really brings these you beautiful songs. You will certainly enjoy this homage to this incredible composer who died in 1950.”

Now, Ute Lemper is out with a new album Pirate Jenny, celebrating the music of the late great composer Kurt Weill for his 125th birthday. Lemper stresses she wants to make sure everyone is exposed to Weill’s brilliance.

“The performance at 54 Below will be different from my new album, it will just be me with the piano. I go straight down to the human soul and tell the stories. The album has eight of my favorite songs, some from Kurt Weill’s German repertoire, “Solomon Song” and “Mac the Knife, and “Pirate Jenny” is a brilliant song and of course the Great American Songbook songs that work well this groove. It takes it out of the theater and just brings it into this atmospheric groove. You’ll want to listen to it from the beginning to the end because it has like conceptual sound to it.”

*Ute Lemper reimagines Kurt Weill’s “Mac The Knife” on her new album*

Ute’s portrayals in musicals and plays on Broadway, in Paris, Berlin and in London’s West End have also thrilled audiences.

Lemper became a jazz fan when she was just a teenager.

You can SEE Doug Doyle’s entire interview with Ute Lemper here.

Press : Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.

by chamaleon on May 25, 2025May 30, 2025

Publication: New York Times
By: Elysa Gardner
Date: May 26, 2025

The German-born cabaret performer’s latest album celebrates the 125th anniversary of Kurt Weill’s birth, yoking classics to the language of today’s music.

A woman in a black dress with strawberry blond hair gives a half-smile from a cozy-looking seat.

Ute Lemper in the Birdsong Society room in New York for a performance.Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York Times

“Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,” Ute Lemper announced.

The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society’s small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades.

Sliding into the album’s title number, “Pirate Jenny,” Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in “The Threepenny Opera,” the most celebrated of Weill’s noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It’s also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests.

“It’s a song about revolution and rebellion,” Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She’ll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model.

Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released “Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill” in 1988. The album, which evolved from “a little fringe record I made in Berlin” a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception.

“The Germans hated it,” Lemper recalled. “They weren’t interested in speaking about the past.” Decca’s chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile.

“It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,” Lemper said. “And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.”

Lemper lived for a while in Paris and in London, where she starred in the Brecht- and Weill-inspired musicals of John Kander and Fred Ebb, winning an Olivier Award for her portrayal of the merry murderess Velma Kelly in “Chicago,” a role she also played on Broadway. Since 1998 she has called New York home; she currently resides on the Upper West Side with her second husband, the musician Todd Turkisher.

A long-legged woman in a strappy black minidress performs a song and dance number in the spotlight with two other black-clad actors.

Lemper in a London production of “Chicago” in 1997, playing Velma Kelly, a role she also performed on Broadway.Credit…Donald Cooper/Alamy

Turkisher played percussion on “Pirate Jenny,” which also features “Mack the Knife,” “My Ship,” “Speak Low” and “Surabaya Johnny.” Co-produced by David Chesky, Turkisher’s frequent collaborator, and Lemper, the tracks wrap her pungent, dramatically astute vocals — applied through the years to the words and music of artists as diverse as Jacques Brel, Philip Glass, Nick Cave and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda — in Chesky’s atmospheric, often eerie arrangements.

The album sprang from a conversation Lemper had last year with Chesky, who released it on his label, the Audiophile Society. Lemper pointed out to Chesky, also a composer, that 2025 would be the 125th anniversary of Weill’s birth. “And he said, ‘you should do something different. Let’s make it more accessible for a new generation, with a groovy component, but without watering down the strength of the stories.’”

In an email exchange, Chesky wrote, “Ute owns this genre of Weill material; she understands the world of Brecht and Weill better than anyone I have ever encountered. But I proposed to her, what if we took these classic songs and set them in this dark, late-night, Berlin cabaret vibe, while using the electronic language of today’s music? Then you have versions that still honor the songs but have a more direct connection to today’s world.”

Adrienne Haan, another German-born, New York-based singer who has won acclaim performing a range of international material, including Weill’s songs, was a teenager when she first discovered Lemper. In a phone interview, Haan, 47, said she had been influenced by many artists who recorded from the 1920s through the ’50s, “but Ute was much closer to my age, and she was such a strong interpreter. There was a certain steel in her voice, and I found it fascinating that someone from Germany, from the generation above me, could make it in America.”

A prolific live performer, Lemper will trace Weill’s life and songbook on May 27 and 29 at the Manhattan cabaret venue 54 Below. The engagement follows one earlier this month at Neue Gallerie, where she presented another favorite program, “Rendezvous With Marlene,” based on a three-hour phone conversation she had in the late 1980s with another German woman known for denouncing Hitler: Marlene Dietrich.

Lemper had written Dietrich, then in her late 80s, “to apologize” for comparisons that had been drawn between them, “and to thank her for the inspiration she had given to generations of women,” she said.

“Marlene was a woman ahead of her time; she raised the gender question 100 years ago — she was bisexual, she dressed like a man,” she added. “And she became an American citizen and fought against the Nazis, entertaining troops on the front lines. She wanted to go home later, but the Germans thought she was a traitor.”

Lemper, posing for a portrait on a staircase of the Birdsong Society, with a brightly colored painting of a bird on the wall beside her.

Press : Make It Your Own, Then Pass It On (Ute Lemper)

by chamaleon on May 22, 2025May 23, 2025

Publication: Creatives Prevail (podcast)
By: Michael Zimmerlich
Date: May 22, 2025

Ute Lemper reflects on her four decade career as a globally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and actor. We discuss her bold reinterpretation of Kurt Weill, the weight of German history in her work, and how staying true to her creative instincts has led to timeless collaborations with artists like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.

Click below graphic to listen to the podcast:

Transcript:

Mike: Hey Ute, how are you?

Ute: Hello. Good morning. How are you?

Mike: Good morning to you as well. I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How are you doing?

Ute: I am here in New York and enjoying a beautiful spring day. And, um, yes, just back from a big project I did with the Pina Bausch Dance Company in Europe and enjoying a couple of days home before I take off again.

Mike: Oh, that’s wonderful. Do you travel often for your work?

Ute: Oh, I travel all the time. My career is based in Europe and most of my concerts are in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, and the UK. The summers are packed with festivals in Europe. I usually work with European promoters and agents. The projects are wonderful. But I always return to New York, which is home.

Mike: I love that. I can imagine how much your career has evolved through the years. At what point did you realize you were going to pursue performance as your life’s work?

Ute: Well, already at age 15 or 16, I knew that I would follow a path that would lead into the arts. I was studying ballet at a conservatory. I had piano lessons and was singing in a youth choir. It was my second nature. I wasn’t really interested in anything else. I had excellent grades in school, but I was drawn to music, dance, and expression.

Mike: That sense of artistic purpose really comes through in your work. When did you first start developing a relationship with the music of Kurt Weill?

Ute: My first connection was not through Weill directly but through Bertolt Brecht and German literature and history. Later, when I moved to Vienna, I encountered the world of cabaret, chanson, and Weill’s music through performances and the local culture. It resonated deeply with me. Weill’s music contains irony, despair, and truth. And growing up in post-war Germany, there was a silence surrounding our past. The Weimar era songs spoke to that silence.

Mike: Was there a specific moment where that connection became something you wanted to pursue professionally?

Ute: Absolutely. When I performed in Cabaret and then moved into The Blue Angel, the parallels became too strong to ignore. These shows touched on themes of identity, displacement, and moral complexity. And when I eventually recorded Weill’s songs, I felt like I was reclaiming something lost from my country’s artistic soul. I wasn’t just performing—I was reconstructing memory.

Mike: That’s so powerful. It reminds me of what you said elsewhere about how these songs aren’t just historical—they’re urgent. Is that how Pirate Jenny came to be?

Ute: Yes, very much. Pirate Jenny was born out of rage and frustration about what’s happening in our world today. Social injustice, suppression, violence—these are themes that have always been with us. The songs of Weill and Brecht were written in exile, in resistance. When I perform Pirate Jenny, I channel those emotions. It’s a revolutionary cry, and I want it to reach the next generation.

Mike: That reminds me—your work spans generations, and you’ve collaborated with so many great artists, from Tom Waits to Nick Cave. How do you choose your collaborators?

Ute: Authenticity is what I seek. I need to feel a deep artistic connection. With Tom Waits, for example, there was mutual respect. We didn’t talk too much. The music did the talking. These collaborations aren’t about name value. They’re about truth, emotion, and vision.

Mike: And speaking of vision, you also wrote and performed Rendezvous with Marlene, based on a phone conversation you had with Marlene Dietrich. How did that come about?

Ute: In the late ’80s, I was cast in a revival of The Blue Angel, and suddenly I was in the press a lot being compared to Marlene. And out of the blue, she called me. We spoke for hours. She told me stories—beautiful and painful. And then she disappeared again. That conversation stayed with me for decades. Eventually, I wrote a show around it. It’s a fictionalized memory—but deeply rooted in that real exchange.

Mike: That’s amazing. Do you ever feel a sense of responsibility when performing this material, given its history?

Ute: Of course. But it’s not a burden—it’s an honor. This material holds emotional and cultural weight. My job is not to replicate it but to live in it anew. I’m not doing a museum piece. I’m living the emotions now. That’s how you keep these songs alive.

Mike: I love that. And it seems like you’ve carried that mindset across your entire career, even as you shift styles and mediums. How do you stay creatively inspired?

Ute: Curiosity. And listening. The world is full of inspiration. Right now I’m working on fusing chanson with jazz, electronic elements, and storytelling. It never ends. I don’t want to be stagnant. I want to remain a student of art.

Mike: Before we wrap up, I have a few quick questions. What was your first concert?

Ute: I think my first classical concert was with my parents. But the first concert that truly excited me was seeing Nina Hagen. She was wild. Unapologetic. A true original.

Mike: Who are you listening to these days?

Ute: Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Edith Piaf. But also Björk, PJ Harvey, and Nils Frahm. I love artists who bend genres.

Mike: And if you could give one piece of advice to emerging creatives?

Ute: Go for it. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t compromise your dignity—especially for women, that’s vital. Stay strong, stay curious, and speak your truth. The world needs honest voices.

Mike: Thank you so much. This was honestly such an honor to have you on the show.

Ute: Thank you. It was a joy to speak with you. Have a beautiful day.

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Ute Lemper

chamaleon