Ute Lemper Channels Marlene Dietrich To Mark the Diva’s 125th Birthday

Ute Lemper: Celebrating Marlene Dietrich’s 125th BirthdayThrough January 3154 BelowUte Lemper“Pirate Jenny: Kurt Weill Reimagined”(The Audiophile Society)In the nearly 15 years since 54 Below first opened for business, this is the first time I have seen the stage set up like a play, or with anything substantially more than instruments and music stands. To the right of the piano, there stands a veritable shrine to Marlene Dietrich: various gowns, a vintage LP phonograph, three unopened bottles of champagne, one of Ute Lemper’s own LPs — with a cover in which she looks remarkably like Dietrich — and a vintage rotary telephone.Ms. Lemper makes her entrance from stage left, singing “Le Chevalier de Paris” (“When the World Was Young”) in both French and English. When she reaches the stage, slinking past musical director Vana Gierig at the grand piano, we gradually learn what all the props are for.The framework for this celebration of the legendary diva’s 125th birthday is what Ute Lemper refers to as her rendezvous with Dietrich in 1987. She begins by whisking us back 40 years to when she was 24 and starring in a Paris production of Kander & Ebb’s “Cabaret.” Ms. Lemper was also the toast of Paree, and local newspapers were hailing her as “La Nouvelle Marlene.”Ms. Lemper was afraid that this title would be an affront to the actual Marlene, who was then retired and reclusive and living in Paris. To correct this perceived slight, Ms. Lemper, who had been born and raised in West Germany, wrote Dietrich a letter, en deutsch, apologizing proactively.She wasn’t surprised that the letter reached Frau Dietrich, even though she didn’t have the address, but she was startled when La Marlene responded by calling her on the phone. Dietrich wasn’t offended, but she was curious about this young singer-actress who was being compared to her. From there they started talking, and before she knew it, three hours had gone by, which is represented in about 75 minutes of stage time.When Ms. Lemper is talking to the house directly, it’s clear she’s “playing” herself; then she shifts to becoming the 85-year-old Dietrich, speaking to the young Ute. And from there she gradually transitions into Dietrich at various stages of her life.We go back to 1930, when “Der blaue Engel” made the young Marie Magdalene Dietrich into an international star, who was soon summoned to Hollywood by the mega moguls of Tinseltown. Then to the war years, by which time she had not only become an American citizen but also perhaps the world’s most prominent, most uncompromising, most vehement — and certainly most glamorous — anti-Nazi. She would spend the rest of life trying to reconcile her love for her fatherland (Vaterland) with her hatred of Hitler and everything he stood for.Fully inhabiting Dietrich at key flash points and singing signature songs of her career, Ms. Lemper transports us to 1960 when Dietrich made a bittersweet return to Germany. She would never set foot there again, but she was rightfully hailed as a hero in Israel, where she received the Medal of Valor.Ute Lemper at 54 Below. Photo by Scott PerrinThe songs fill the gap between scenes and stories, and vice-versa. They take us from the height of Dietrich’s film career, when she sang songs written for her by the German Jewish composer Frederick Hollander: her romantic and iconic waltz, “Falling in Love Again;” the lovely “Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte,” which translates roughly as “When I Wish for Myself” but which doesn’t seem to have ever received an English lyric; and the haunting “Want to Buy Some Illusions” from “Foreign Affair” (1948), the first of two classic films she made with fellow German expatriate Billy Wilder.In the 1960s, she is singing “Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind,” the most poignant rendition ever of Pete Seeger’s hootenanny hit “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” as reimagined for her by the Jewish American composer Burt Bacharach; although he is reluctant to admit it in later years, he is also her lover.By the time of her phone call to Ute Lemper, Dietrich was a walking contradiction; vain to a fault, she was hiding from public view, afraid to let the world see her age, at once loving Paris but missing her homeland. You can’t nearly do justice to 92 very complicated years of living and loving in 75 fast moving minutes, but it’s to Ms. Lemper’s credit that she gives us a highly nuanced glimpse not only into the complexity but the wonder of it all.Surprisingly, Dietrich wasn’t closely connected to the most famous composer of the Weimar era, Kurt Weill, who is Ms. Lemper’s major muse. Over the decades, she has returned multiple times to this wellspring of inspiration, much as Barb Jungr has done with the Bob Dylan songbook and Melissa Errico with Stephen Sondheim.My favorite of her Weill projects, her 2011 concert with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, has still, alas, never been properly released commercially. Still, the new “Pirate Jenny: Kurt Weill Reimagined” is a worthy addition to the canon: The accompaniment is a mix of electronics and traditional instruments, and there’s much postproduction mixing, multitracking, electronic beats, and special effects.Weill’s songs and Ms. Lemper’s voice are the key elements in a vast audio dreamscape; it’s a fascinating project, kind of Kurt Weill meets Brian Eno, what we might call electronica noir. It shows us, among other things, that Weill’s music belongs not only to the past but also to the future.

Ute Lemper Channels Marlene Dietrich To Mark the Diva’s 125th Birthday

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