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Publication: Stage and Screen
By: PAULANNE SIMMONS
Date: OCTOBER 18, 2023

Ute Lemper’s Time Traveler, which plays Joe’s Pub one more time on October 22, highlights pivotal events in the German-born chanteuse’s life. These events include her move to Berlin forty years ago when she became part of a Kurt Weill show; her 1987 move to Paris to play Sally Bowles in Cabaretand her first performance at Joe’s Pub twenty-eight years ago, not long after Joseph Papp had inaugurated The Public Theater.

But the time Lemper seems to recall most lovingly was when, after being dubbed in France “La  Nouvelle Marlene,” she wrote Dietrich a letter and was rewarded by a phone call from the iconic star herself. Lemper’s rendering of Deitrich, her heroic stand against the Nazis and the subsequent anger of her fellow-Germans, is both moving and funny. It gave birth to her album, Rendezvous with Marlene.

Lemper seems most comfortable with songs written and performed by the great artists in Berlin cabaret during the days of the Weimar Republic, or songs written in a similar style. Her repertoire included Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”; Kurt Schwabach and Mischa Spoliansky’s “The Lavender Song,” with its militant lyrics, “We’re not afraid to be queer and different”; and a medley of songs by Schiffer, Spoliansky and Hollander, all about sexual freedom and social decadence.

As Lemper put it, “We would have had the sixties in the forties if the Nazis had not destroyed it.”

Lemper likes songs with poetic lyrics written by people like Charles Bukowsky (“The Crunch”) and Jacques Prévert. With her deep, smoky voice she can deliver these songs with great feeling. She also knows how to bend a note, imitate musical instruments, and scat, all in the time-honored tradition of jazz.

Lemper performs a heartbreaking version of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” It doesn’t hurt that she can sing in English, French and German. And there are also a few original songs from her newest album Time Traveler.

Ute Lemper travels through time with compassion, a world-weary nod and a wink.

photos by Guido Harari

Time Travelers
Ute Lemper
Joes Pub at The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street
last show Sunday October 22, 2023, at 8:30pm
for tickets, visit Public/Joe’s Pub
for tour dates and cities, visit Ute Lemper

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Click on the above image to watch  Ute’s new video for “At The Reservoir” from her new album “Time Traveler”.

“WITH LOVE TO MY FAVORITE SPOT IN NEW YORK CITY – AT THE RESERVOIR IN CENTRAL PARK Thousands of people walk and run here everyday to find a piece of inner peace. So do I with thoughts and music on my mind. The song is born here.”

Video by @WEAREM2
Song written by Ute Lemper.
Produced by Ute Lemper/ Todd Turkisher
Publisher: BMG
Label: jazzhouse records

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Publication: OurQuadcities.com / EINPresswire.com/
By: Andrew Gesner
Date: May 15, 2023

Ute Lemper has cut revelatory versions of songs by many popular artists. “TIME TRAVELER” makes clear that it isn’t only the world that’s changing: we are, too.

In his science fiction classic The Time Machine, H.G. Wells describes the exhilarating (and terrifying) experience of watching the years flutter by like the pages of a flipbook. Moments significant and mundane blur together into a single story of perpetual change. “TIME TRAVELER,” the new video from German musical legend Ute Lemper, brings this vision to life in dazzling color and subtle but resonant strokes. While the singer tells her story from the picture window of her ship on the seas of time, the clock accelerates. Battlefields become temples, the wilderness is tamed and grows wild again, ordinary men morph into historical figures, and the earth itself seems to shiver under the weight of history.

It’s dramatic and fascinating to watch but also a metaphor for Lemper’s award-winning career. Through music, the vocalist has always bridged the distance between past and present – and she’s kept a keen eye on the future, too. Lemper has earned a reputation as one of the most formidable interpretive singers in the world, cutting revelatory versions of songs by Kurt Weill and Brecht, The Berlin Cabaret, Tom Waits, Philip Glass and Nick Cave, and many others. Her reanimation of the work of Edith Piaf revealed the cornerstone French singer to be an artist grounded in tradition but perpetually relevant. Lemper’s imaginative performances in musical theater — The Blue Angel, Peter Pan, Cabaret, and Chicago, to name a few of the shows she’s starred in — have established her as a cornerstone of the European stage and Broadway.

“TIME TRAVELER,” too, feels simultaneously contemporary, anticipatory, and rooted in the classics. This is a sophisticated jazz-pop sung written by the artist herself, an impeccable vocalist — but it’s also playful, and its starry-eyed lyrical hook will resonate with romantics of all kinds. And as the clip for “TIME TRAVELER” makes clear, it isn’t only the world around us that’s changing: we’re changing, too. The video shows us a version of Ute Lemper unshackled by time. Sometimes we’re shown the youthful Lemper who scaled the walls of contemporary theater with her dazzling talent, sometimes we get the current masterful Lemper, and sometimes we see the artist in transition, growing into her next challenge. The continuity is visible, and the message is clear. Time can’t lay a glove on her. No matter where she’s been or who she’s portrayed, she’s always been her brilliant self.

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Andrew Gesner
HIP Video Promo
+1 732-613-1779
email us here

See original article online here.