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.

A memoirist and a songwriter, too, Lemper, looking back, said, “I so appreciate aging. I would never want to turn the wheel back — except maybe for a little less backache, and a new hip.”Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York Times

Attentive to history’s darker recurrences as well as its nuances, Lemper is wary of certain comparisons that have been made involving President Trump. “There is only one Hitler,” she said, but called the current moment a “new chapter,” that is “really worrisome” in no uncertain terms.

Lemper has also been interested in expressing herself more through songwriting. In 2023 she released “Time Traveler,” consisting entirely of original material, as well as a memoir in German with the same title, “Die Zeitreisende” — featuring an epilogue by her daughter, Stella, who just earned her master’s degree in creative writing at Columbia University.

“I had already published a memoir when I was 30,” Lemper mused. “An East German publisher asked me to write it, because so much had already happened with my career, and living through the fall of the Wall.” She hopes the new book, which has been translated into Italian, can also be made available in English: “I incorporated tales from those times, and obviously followed that up with more decades of life and motherhood and ups and downs. I so appreciate aging. I would never want to turn the wheel back — except maybe for a little less backache, and a new hip.”

Lemper is considering a replacement, but only when she can find time in her schedule — which this spring alone has also included a German revival of a staging of Brecht and Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” which she first performed in more than three decades ago. “We’re going to take it to Paris next year, and then London,” she said. “I still have more to give, and I have to give it at every performance. The more you give, the more you have.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Songs of Rebellion Revisited. Click here for the online article.

Publication: Broadwayworld.com
By: Josh Sharpe
Date: April 3, 2025

Photo credit: Jim Rackete

On the 75th anniversary of revolutionary composer Kurt Weill’s passing, acclaimed singer & actress Ute Lemper has released Speak Low, the new single from her album Pirate Jenny, out April 25 via The Audiophile Society.

Composed by Kurt Weill for the musical One Touch of Venus, Speak Low was inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and popularly performed by Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya, and others such as Tony Bennett, Barbara Streisand, and Sarah Vaughan. With its tender melodies and romantic depth, “Speak Low” remains one of Weill’s most enduring classics, celebrated in both Broadway and jazz circles.

Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya’s legacy continues through the work of artists like Ute Lemper, who, since 1985, has been performing the songs of Weill and other Jewish composers from the Weimar era— whose music was banned and persecuted by the Nazis. She notes that Weill’s works remain relevant today: “Exotic characters fight for survival, rising from the ashes of racism, disadvantage, and neglect—stories that feel strikingly contemporary.”

Lemper will release one more single from the album, title track “Pirate Jenny” (a revolt against the ruling party of the rich) from The Threepenny Opera – full tracklist below. Sultry vocals and atmospheric beats are brought to life with The Audiophile Society’s immersive Mega-Dimensional Sound™, transporting longtime fans and new listeners alike to a smoky Berlin jazz club outside of time, reminiscent of Lemper’s award-winning roles as Cabaret’s Sally Bowles in Paris and Chicago’s Velma Kelly in New York and London.

Ute Lemper NYC Shows:

Rendezvous With Marlene @ Neue Galerie
Wednesday, May 14 at 7pm ET
Thursday, May 15 at 7pm ET

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill @ 54 Below
Tuesday, May 27 at 7pm ET
Thursday, May 29 at 7pm ET

About Ute Lemper:

Ute Lemper’s decades-long career spans stage, film, and music, with over 30 recordings. Renowned for her interpretations of Berlin Cabaret, Kurt Weill, Brecht, and chanson legends like Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf, she has also starred in major musicals across Broadway, the West End, Paris, and Berlin. She won the American Theater World Award and the Laurence Olivier Award for her performance as Chicago’s Velma Kelly in the West End and on Broadway, the Molière Award for her performance as Cabaret’s Sally Bowles in Paris, among others, and earned Grammy nominations.

Her global tours feature diverse projects, including Rendezvous with Marlene, Songs for Eternity, and tributes to Piazzolla and Brecht. She has composed music inspired by Bukowski, Neruda, and Coelho and released a bestselling autobiography in 2023. She released her self-penned and contemporary album Time Traveler just last year. Singing in five languages, she continues to perform worldwide. A longtime New York resident, she lives there with her family and four children.

Photo Credit: Jim Rackete