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

Photo: Russ Rowland

Publication : British Theatre Guide
Date: 5 February 2020
By: Martin Thomasson

There is a rather excellent podcast entitled, Something Rhymes with Purple which entertains and informs through etymological dissections of words familiar and unfamiliar. (Excellent, that is provided the mere sound of Gyles Brandreth’s voice doesn’t provoke you to thoughts of murder—for it is he, in tandem with the gifted lexicographer, Susie Dent)

Were Gyles and Susie ever to tackle the word ‘consummate’ in its adjectival form, as in the phrase ‘consummate artist’, they would no doubt tell us that it derives from the Latin roots ‘con’ (meaning ‘altogether’) and ‘summa’ (meaning, in this context, ‘supreme’).

Alternatively, for the several hundred of us packed into the RNCM’s theatre for Rendezvous with Marlene, the true meaning of ‘consummate’ has to be ‘Ute Lemper’.

Developed from an actual 1987 phone conversation between Lemper (then 24 years old) and the aged (but clearly still compos mentis) star of Weimar Germany and Hollywood, Rendezvous with Marlene is two and a half hours of wonder and delight.

Lemper enters in a black gown, split almost to the hip, singing Marlene’s song, “Falling in Love Again” in Marlene’s deep, dulcet tones before shifting multiple gears (and keys) to scat with that precision and vocal range that is her own trademark.

Lemper frames her show with a brief (impressive and amusingly recited) autobiography of her own, before leading us into her “rendezvous” with Marlene.

At the time, the 86-year-old Dietrich was dwelling reclusively in her Parisian apartment, with barely enough cash to keep her beloved Moët & Chandon flowing once a week.

“It prickles,” she tells Lemper, attempting to communicate the enduring sensory delights of drinking champagne.

Lemper had written to Dietrich out of humility, begging her pardon for critical reviews drawing comparisons between the young upstart and the Grande Dame of cabaret and silver screen.

She wasn’t expecting a reply, especially by telephone, and wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. The mere suggestion she might be allowed to ask questions met with a firm rebuke:

““This is not an interview,” snapped Dietrich down the line, “I just want to talk. About myself.”

And talk, she does, with wit and verve and unapologetic frankness.

If I speak as though Dietrich is there on stage tonight, that is because Lemper makes us feel this. Her embodiment of ‘the woman of the future’ (as she calls Dietrich) is so persuasive one feels that to call it acting is almost to undervalue it. Both women are there onstage. (Edith Piaf also makes a brief “appearance”—Lemper’s sorcery here is equally unfussy, equally compelling).

We should take a moment to pay tribute to Lemper’s stamina and powers of concentration. One woman (with a very fine quartet of musicians) holding an audience rapt for two and a half hours, during which she barely falters. (For prospective audience members of lesser stamina, let me reassure you, there is a fifteen minute interval after the opening ninety-minute set).

Of course, a good deal of the captivation is due to the incredible autobiography of Lemper’s subject and her deliciously aphoristic manner of telling it.

“If I had my time again, I would make all the same mistakes only start earlier, so I could enjoy them more.”

The brutal, unflinching honesty (both given and taken):

“Your legs aren’t that good, Marlene. You just know what to do with them,” said her dear friend, Billy Wilder.

The name dropping (hey, if Marlene can’t, who can?!) Gable, Carole Lombard, JFK, George Bernard Shaw, Burt Bacharach, Mae West… and dozens more, many of them (male and female) her lovers.

The demands:

“No Dior, no Marlene.” (This to Alfred Hitchcock: “I got my Dior, he got his Marlene.”)

Even the most prolific of lovers, living the most open of marriages, was always bound to have someone special, the love of her life. For Marlene, this was the great French actor, Jean Gabin—a passionate and turbulent affair.

“Come over,” says Gabin, at one point in Marlene’s account, “I have whisky. We can fight all we want.”

The pain of their break-up (due to his desire to be a father) stays with her. Her rendition of Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” is one of the evening’s most beautiful and tender moments.

The rendezvous does not shy away from two other sources of pain in Dietrich’s life. One is her estrangement from her daughter, Maria, whom she had to bribe to postpone publication of a hostile biography until after her death. The other is her fraught relationship with her homeland—so cultured, so monstrous.

The fact that Dietrich’s decision to relocate to Hollywood, take US citizenship and work for the Americans in World War Two was down to her intense hatred of the Nazis was not sufficient excuse for many of her compatriots. Right wing protests and stink bombs accompanied her rare post-war returns to Berlin. Even her funeral (attended by Lemper) had to be low-key.

“My soul belongs to France, my heart to England. Germany can have my dead body.”

The set is simple: downstage left, a single armchair, draped with throws, surrounded with bottles of booze and Lemper’s album (which Dietrich bought). Occasional back projections (mainly of the war and of postwar Berlin in ruins). Other than that, it’s just Ute and her quartet of exceptional musicians—“my boys” as she calls them, with warmth rather than condescension. What a team they are!

Ute Lemper. She acts, she sings, she dances.

Altogether supreme.

Click here to read online at British Theatre Review

Singer and actress Ute Lemper pictured in London    CREDIT: Andrew Crowley

Publication: The Daily Telegraph
Date: 31 January 2020
By: Maureen Paton

‘It was frustrating to my two husbands that they could not be on the same level’ CREDIT: Luciano Viti/Getty

But after making her name in other people’s shows, Lemper is now creating her own work: Songs For Eternity – a collection of music from Holocaust survivors, Forever: The Love Poems Of Pablo Neruda and now Rendezvous With Marlene, which she hopes will eventually reach the West End and beyond. The epitome of the crossover artist who can seamlessly move from jazz and rock to pop and her speciality, the Threepenny Opera composer Kurt Weill, Lemper’s success in concert halls, recording studios (more than 30 albums), theatres and vast stadiums – including the Olympic one in Munich in 1989 – proved so lucrative that it paid for her two older children’s university education.

That has brought its own domestic challenges, however. “To be successful, the breadwinner, to be in charge – I would say that the man has a bit more of a problem to accept that reality. It was frustrating to my two husbands that they could not be on the same level… Once the competition starts, there are unhealthy feelings in a relationship.”

She lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her second husband, musician Todd Turkisher, and their two children Julian, 14, and Jonas, eight, to whom she gave birth at 48, with frequent visits from the two older ones – Max, 25, and Stella, 23 – by her first marriage to former comedian and drama teacher David Tabatsky.

One eyebrow-raising solution, she reveals, to making her relationship with Turkisher work over 20 years so far is to “go out with other men at night. I’ve learned that it’s important to invite other strong sources into your life to support you. So when I go to the movies, it’s not always with my husband… I have chosen to do this just to take the weight off the marriage, you know? We don’t always have to be together and watch each other and control each other. I enjoy very much other relationships.” When I ask if that means physical, she laughs and says, “Maybe. But too much information!”

The directness of New Yorkers has proved a natural fit for this citizen of the world, who grew up with a mother and father that were brought up to shake hands with their own ultra-formal parents every morning and night instead of embracing them. “German women are pretty direct too, they have a natural self-confidence,” she concedes, adding “that’s true of a lot of women these days. But I always thought German men were a bit bureaucratic, though I haven’t had one [as a partner] for a very long time.

“I would have to work very hard to be with a German man: it’s hard to relax a bit, the sense of humour lacks a little bit. My first and second husband are both New York Jewish men who talk a lot; they’re very much alike. I have to ask for some silence in the house,” she adds with another laugh. As a post-war German born in 1963, she still broods over her country’s dark mid-20th-century history. “It does make you wonder what it is in the German character that the population went along with Nazism,” she says in her forthright way.

“If you look at Germany now, it’s an incredible country: they are good people, they march in support of immigrants, they’re exemplary. But the way earlier on that the people followed those Nazi rules – was it just the failure of the Weimar Republic or is there something authoritarian in their character to have that obedience to authority?” That’s why, with the resurgence of the far right among nationalist movements in Europe, Lemper feels the need to tell Dietrich’s multi-faceted story of courage and defiance in her public and private life.

After she was brought to Hollywood by her mentor Josef Von Sternberg in 1930, Dietrich established a fund with the director Billy Wilder and other exiles to help refugees escape from Nazi Germany. In 1947 she was awarded the American Medal of Freedom for her work in entertaining Allied troops overseas during the war as well as France’s Legion D’Honneur.

As Lemper says, “Germany had lost its conscience, its soul, at that time, which is terrifying for a civilised country. Marlene was its expatriate conscience, which was why she should be a role model for so many of us. “Like her, I’m very independent and freedom-loving. Problematic judgement is of no interest to me. I just keep going.”

  Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene tours until February 8. For details, visitutelemper.com

Click here to read this article on The Telegraph

Publication: GScene
Date: February 2020 Issue
By: Brian Butler

International performer Ute Lemper has had a career-long love of the songs of the legendary Marlene Dietrich. She tells Brian Butler about her new Marlene show – due in Hove in February.

It was 1987 in Paris and a young performer called Ute had just opened to rave reviews as Sally Bowles in the stage musical Cabaret. “On my first night I saw Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in the front row.” She won the Moliere Award and the media called her the new Liza … the new Marlene, “and I thought oh my God!”

Marlene was then 87, a recluse in her Paris apartment. The young Ute wrote to the ageing performer, apologising for the media hype and the comparison to Marlene. What happened then was the basis of Ute’s new show, Rendezvous with Marlene.

“She rang me and we had a three hour phone conversation about Marlene’s career, her love affairs, her songs. I put it away in my memory and rarely talked about it.”

Fast forward 32 years and Ute decided it was ti me to revisit that conversation and make something of it. “I decided it was ti me to give her life again, mixed with my own choices and my own personal experiences. So it’s a dialogue between the two of us, which Marlene takes over in a kind of time warp of both of us. 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.”

The rise of nationalistic movements, particularly in Germany – new forms of racism against immigrants, along with new views of sexuality, mean it’s the right time, according to Ute.

I wondered how much of the 32-year-old conversation Ute remembered? “I remember some expressions she used; her bitterness about her rejection by her homeland as a traitor in post-war Germany and I’ve done a lot of research too. I don’t imitate her; she had a very different musicality, a very different way of singing, almost speaking some songs.”

“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, and masculine in her style. She was very much the boss and absolutely sexy. It was a new aesthetic at the time.”

“Marlene didn’t speak a lot about her bisexuality, her polygamous affairs. Virtually everyone she worked with, men or women, she slept with. She was equally attracted to both sexes.”

Her banishment from Germany lasted many years. When she appeared there in the 1960s she was shouted at and there were bomb threats to stop her concerts. Ute says: “She told me she wanted to go back to Germany one more time – in her coffin; and she did.”

The song Lily Marlene has a great significance in Dietrich’s career. She sang it to the Allied troops on the front line in WW2 and it was broadcast via military radio all over Europe. It’s said she spent longer at the front than Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower. The Nazis hated her for it.

In Berlin in 1992 Ute was due to recreate Marlene’s famous role in the Blue Angel, where she sings her first hit Falling In Love Again. “Ten days before our first night Marlene died. I went to her funeral, it was threatened by neo-Nazi demonstrations. Her memorial event in Paris was attended by huge crowds; in Berlin her funeral was attended by under 100.”

But in 2001, for what would have been her 100th birthday celebrations in Berlin, she was finally rehabilitated. Indeed Ute has performed this new Marlene show in the city, doing the whole thing in German. She’s also performed it entirely in French and English.

The show is constantly progressing – it’s been known for Ute to change its format mid­performa nee, and she now plans a fully-staged version destined for a continuous run in a theatre – first in New York and then hopefully in London. “I may add another performer to play various roles and dance,” she tells me. Ute has straddled many forms of music and her stage appearances have been heavily dominated by solo work. “I’ve done 30 years of it, but I also love the family feel of ensemble theatre.”

The song choice for this show varies, depending on the country she’s appearing in – more Brel and Piaf in France; more Weill in Germany; more American songs when she’s performing in English.

“The show is deeply tragic, but also comic – after all she claimed to have had 50,000 lovers! And I enjoy channel.ling the pain of her life. It’s not a romantic style. I aim to get to the core of her life.”

MORE INFO 9 UTE LEMPER: RENDEZVOUS WITH MARLENE is on tour and at The Old Market, Hove, February 3, 2020.

Click here for a pdf of the article