Publication: Theater Life
By: Paulanne Simmons
Date: November 29, 2020

In 1988, when Ute Lemper received the Molière Award for her performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret in Paris, she was certainly very happy. But what really amazed and delighted the German-born actress, was when she was compared to the legendary Marlene Dietrich. As Dietrich was also living Paris at the time, Lemper sent her a postcard addressed simply to Dietrich at Avenue Montaigne. Not long afterwards she got a phone call.

The phone conversation lasted three hours. During that time, Dietrich, who was 89, looked back on her life: her rise from a Weimar cabaret performer to a Hollywood star, her many love affairs, her work as an American soldier during World War II, her triumphs and her disappointments. Thirty years later, Lemper turned that conversation into her “personal homage to that great lady.”

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous with Marlene recreates that phone conversation in cabaret form, allowing the audience to see Dietrich much as she must have appeared in those early Weimar days. Lemper plays herself only briefly, to set the scene. The rest is pure Dietrich, with Lemper singing many of the star’s most beloved songs.

Lemper is a gifted actress with a powerful and emotive voice. She mimics all of Dietrich’s marvelous ticks and she has the sexy legs that are de rigueur in a show about the diva. Like Dietrich, she speaks and sings in English, German and French. She also reproduces Dietrich’s husky, sexy voice, and then some. Lemper has a vocal range that far exceeds anything Dietrich could have ever dreamed of.

In a slinky dress, sporting one of Dietrich’s signature top hats or throwing a boa over her shoulders, Lemper belts, croons or purrs a repertoire that includes Leonello Casucci’s “Just A Gigolo,” Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One For My Baby,” Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” and Friedrich Hollaender’s “They Call Me Naughty Lola.” But perhaps the most touching moments are when Lemper sings Pete Seeger’s mournful “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” or the song soldiers on both sides during World War II made their own, Norbert Schulze and Hans Leip’s “Lili Marleen.”

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous with Marlene began as a touring cabaret show. Now, after being filmed at Club Cumming in New York, Alan Cumming and Ute Lemper are streaming the show online. This allows them to take advantage of all the cinematic effects that cannot be realized in a live performance: fades, montage, smooth scene shifts.

As Lemper tells us many times during the show, Dietrich was a woman who lived every day to the fullest, while at the same placing one foot in the future. She was a sexually liberated woman, with an open marriage and affairs with men and women, who ranged from co-stars to technicians to whoever pleased her at the moment. She would not tolerate anyone telling her what to do, whether that was the Fuhrer or director Alfred Hitchcock. She was totally independent.

Nevertheless, an aging Dietrich is filled with regret. She has left the one man she really loved Jean Gaban. She is alienated from her daughter, Maria, who rightly claims she was not a very good mother. Germans consider her a traitor and do not welcome her back.

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous with Marlene is over two hours long. It is never boring. This is partly due to the nature of the legendary star who inspired the show. But it is also thanks to Lemper’s great artistry and sensitive treatment of her material.

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene will be stream online on Wednesday, November 25, 2020 at 8:00pm (EST) and Saturday, December 5, 2020 at 2:00pm (EST). Tickets are $25 and may be purchased at https://www.stellartickets.com/events/club-cumming-productions/ute-lemper-in-rendezvous-with-marlene.

Click here to read the article on Theater Life site.

Photo by Russ Rowland.

Publication: London Living Large
By: J.C.
Date: November 29, 2020

We fell in love again! Not just with Marlene, but with Ute. This production is more than an homage to the great Dietrich. Ute Lemper tells us the story and sings the songs, but she doesn’t just imitate … she channels a cultural icon. Marlene Dietrich was someone who defined the “new woman.” Sexually liberated, shocking and iconoclastic, Dietrich challenged her society and its values while anticipating ours. Politically progressive and not afraid to stand up for what she believed in, Dietrich was a portrait in political courage that should resonate for our own time. The show also examines the compelling Marlene persona and yields dark insight into the confines that is the construct of ‘celebrity’ … a topic so very relevant to today. But ultimately, this is a show about the woman herself, and Lemper offers us insight into a complex and fascinating human being while contemplating her own personal relationship with the star. This is a one-woman show that has all the expected songs but it also uses an eclectic choice of other music to present the diva. The transitions are seamless, the production values are first-rate and the cabaret act has been cleverly adapted to a new online format. The show works beautifully as it is presented and it offers a wonderful break from Covid days. It also really whetted our appetite to experience the Ute Lemper/Marlene Dietrich experience live. We’ll be first in the queue when we all get out again!

Photo: Russ Rowland

Publication: thespyinthestalls.com
By: Jonathan Evans
Date: November 25, 2020

“This is beautiful and captivating storytelling through music and memory”

“Welcome to my rendezvous with Marlene. It is a true story that indeed happened in the year 1987, in Paris… Marlene Dietrich was a ‘woman of the future’. And that woman of the future gave me a message, for us – in that future today. Let’s go back in time”.

So begins Ute Lemper’s cabaret style show about Dietrich’s extraordinary life; a dialogue in words and music recorded at Alan Cummings’ club in New York. The starting point is a letter Ute wrote to Dietrich apologising for being dubbed the ‘New Marlene’. Ute thought she was nothing of the sort – she was just at the beginning of her career in theatre and music, whereas Marlene was looking back on a long, fulfilled life of movies, music, love stories and stardom. But out of the blue, returning to her hotel while appearing as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, Ute received a telephone call from Marlene, and that conversation forms the basis of this show.

“They know my voice, my legs, my movies… but they don’ t know me”, intones Ute in the distinctive, off-key, husky voice of Marlene’s. The telephone had become, by now, her only connection to the outside world and for the next three hours, if we are to believe the narrative, Dietrich poured out her life story. And believe it we do, as Ute slips back and forth in time, playing both herself and Marlene with reverential attention to detail. Ute not only captures the mannerisms and cadences and key moments, but she digs deeper and inhabits her thoughts too. We get a deeply personalised account of this ‘woman of the future’, who renounced her native Germany in protest at the Nazi regime and who challenged the men around her including world leaders. We follow her from the beginning; from the Weimar cabaret, her thrust into stardom with ‘Blue Angel’, her contribution to the American war effort, her Hollywood career, her eventual return to Berlin despite the hostility she received there, her humanitarian efforts and her final solitude. And, of course, the love affairs.

At the core are the songs. Iconic, and forever associated with Dietrich. Backed by a five-piece band led by pianist Vana Gierig, the modern flavour complements the sensual richness of Ute’s vocals. ‘Falling in Love Again’, ‘Just a Gigolo’, ‘One for my Baby’, ‘Illusions’, ‘Lili Marleen’, ‘The Ruins of Berlin’, ‘The Laziest Gal in Town’, ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’… and more. It is safe to say that Ute improves immeasurably on the originals. She is in top form here, stretching way, way beyond Dietrich’s limited range technically and emotionally. Her rendition of the songs reveals as much about the private vulnerability of Dietrich as do the anecdotal facts.

This is beautiful and captivating storytelling through music and memory. A loving montage directed and edited by Evan Quinn as we follow Ute following in Marlene’s footsteps. In 1992 she was hired to play Lola in ‘The Blue Angel’ in Berlin; exactly sixty-four years after Marlene was the ‘Blue Angel’ in Weimar times. She had been twenty-eight years old at the time and Ute was, also, twenty-eight. Ten days before opening might, Marlene passed away. Ute was there at the funeral.

“So, what was it that Marlene wanted me to tell you?” Ute asks in the closing moments of the cabaret as we come full cycle. “She wanted to talk about people, nations, stupidity, the empowerment of women, the intelligence of women. She wanted to talk about history. Never to forget. And always to remember.” This parting plea, urging us not to repeat the mistakes of the past, runs deep as she closes with a few bars of ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, followed by a stirring and emotive rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’. One thing is for sure: Ute Lemper’s performance is unforgettable.

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene

filmed at Club Cumming in New York with Alan Cumming and Ute Lemper as producers, will be streamed again globally on Saturday, 5 December 2020 at 19.00.

Click here to book

By: Carole Woddis
Date: November 24, 2020

Marlene, forever the enigma, hated in her home country, Germany, later restored to favour. Wooed in Hollywood, loved by audiences round the world, pinned into frocks – I remember that sequined dress thatwodis made her shuffle to the front of the stage like a geisha when I saw her London – dying a recluse in Paris at 94.

And now Ute Lemper has produced a two hour show about Dietrich’s extraordinary life, already seen in London and toured earlier this year.

Rendezvous with Marlene, a two hour dialogue in words and music between Lemper and Marlene is based on the even more unlikely but true encounter Lemper had with Dietrich through a three hour phone call in which Dietrich poured out her life story.

The German connection would have been the bond but Lemper’s professional career often seems to have parelleled Dietrich if her personal life has been a little less racy – as Dietrich describes it, `all those beautiful leading men and the writers’. And yes women, including the oh so vulnerable Piaf.

Dietrich, says Lemper, was ‘a woman of the future’, determined, ambitious, outspoken.
So here is Lemper in full spate, in a show recorded at Alan Cummings’ club in Manhattan, heavy-lidded like Dietrich’s, flashing thighs with legs that seem to go on forever, haunting the bar for songs like `Boys in the Backroom’ and ‘One for my Baby’.

Here too are the iconic songs associated forever with Dietrich – ‘Lili Marleen’, `Laziest Gal in Town’ and ‘Falling in Love Again’.

Lemper puts her own individual stamp on all of them, inevitably, but with sensitivity thanks to her wonderfully sympathetic backing musicians.

Absolutely fascinating on the life story, Lemper’s voice, pure and clear, can go jazzy or deeply melancholic. Berlin’s Weimar cabaret, i and smokey dives where hearts get broken are conjured with the minimum of effects, sometimes augmented or overlaid by video clips. But she is at her most poignant on Dietrich’s wartime experiences and later, separating from the love of her life, the French film star, Jean Gabin.

At a time of such Little Englander island sentiment, it’s a joy to feel that connection with our European links as Lemper sings with ease in perfect French, English (after her years living in New York) and of course German.

Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene’ has already been streamed globally earlier this month but it is also streaming this Wednesday 25 November at 01.00 and Saturday, 5 December 2020at 19.00. Booking link: https://www.stellartickets.com/events/club-cumming-productions/ute-lemper-in-rendezvous-with-marlene
Fabulous.

Carole Woddis on Facebook

Carole has been a theatre journalist and critic for over 30 years. London reviewer and feature writer for Glasgow’s The Herald for 12 years and for many other newspapers and magazines, she now review for various theatre websites as well as her own.

Publication: GScene
By: Brian Butler
Date: November 23, 2020

One of my 2019 highlights was interviewing the international cabaret star Ute Lemper and then just before lockdown this year seeing her show at the Old Market, Hove.

It was a night of nights. Now she and queer actor Alan Cumming have co-produced a re-imagining of her stunning tribute to the legend that is Marlene Dietrich.

Filmed in the actor’s glitzy, risqué looking  Club Cumming , Ute recreates a real-life incident when as a young performer she was telephoned by the  octogenarian recluse who had seen newspaper reports calling Ute “ the  new Marlene “

Ute with her band of musicians holds our attention from beginning to end, and morphs magically from the 20-something bubbly nervous actor/singer to the fiery, slightly deranged chanteuse with her slurred  husky speech and deeply hooded eyes

It’s an absolute tour de force, made more so in this presentation because the close-ups, fades, editing and background setting in the club give a gripping level of intimacy – we believe we are in the club or Dietrich’s lonely Paris apartment.

The songs work better in this  club setting, and Ute has added a gentleman admirer who she can play some of the songs off , not missing a seductive, humorous trick. She slinks her way round the club, lingering often at the bar – this works really well for One For My Baby , the Sinatra hit but also for the Western See What The Boys In The Backroom Will Have.

Ute’s great skill is to make Marlene’s utterances seem absolutely spontaneous and her rambling mind is a crucial part of the performance .

In the final analysis, you’ll remember this outstanding piece of cabaret/theatre for the songs – Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowing In The Wind, Lili Marlene and of course the haunting Falling In Love Again.

Brava Lemper. I hear a tv deal is in the wind to bring this to a more permanent audience – I for one can’t wait.

The show is available to buy on line at 1am Wednesday November 25 and again on  Saturday 5 December at 7pm .

Ticket link here