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She’s been Velma Kelly, Sally Bowles, Grizabella and Bombalurina,
as well as Peter Pan—and therein exist the tangled attractions
of Ute Lemper.
Perhaps best known for her renditions of the Kurt Weill
songspiel, Lemper has proven herself equally adept singing Joni
Mitchell and Van Morrison— as well as Harold Arlen and Lewis
Allen (the nom de plume of Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher
from the Bronx, who happened to have written, in spite of what
Billie Holliday contended, Ms. Holliday’s signature song,
“Strange Fruit”)—which is exactly the sort of contextural
historicity that Ute Lemper offers her audience about all her
material.
Slender as a sylph, Lemper took the stage on Wednesday evening
sheathed in a black gown with plenty of back exposure, a choice
she’d made due to the number of times she imagined she’d be
turning her back to the audience—to drink in the swellegant
nocturnal Manhattan view afforded by the wall of glass in the
Allen Room.
And then that voice… At first, smooth and crystalline clear, a
bubble of honey encircling the room, before she brings it down
raw with snarls and purrs. Moving from “Strange Fruit” to
Frederick Hollander’s “Want to Buy Some Illusions?,” she lays
bare life’s broken promises and inherent compromises. Originally
sung by Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair,
Lemper evokes that other Teutonic temptress—before she’s off
again, with Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” a
song with its own flood of delusionary associations. And when
she oozes into Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny,” there’s the
masochistic torment of every wrong-headed love affair gone awry.
Years ago, Bette Midler recorded Weill’s wail about a besotted
woman in love with a brutal sailor—“Take that pipe out of your
mouth, Johnny!”—a song which, somehow, fit perfectly into the
soundtrack of adolescence in the early Seventies. The time was
right for Weill then—and given humanity’s baser instincts, it’s
almost always time for Weill, which is in keeping with Lemper’s
stated mission to insure that Weill remains a part of the public
songbook.
Similarly, Joni Mitchell’s “Last Chance Lost” served as a
metaphoric rueful reflection upon the current state of the
world, and to hear Lemper sing both this song and Mitchell’s
“Black Crow” was to remember, again, the manner in which those
songs were first introduced into one’s memory bank—when in the
throes of youth with all its attendant promise and illusion. And
how much has changed since then—or has it?
Dreams are still sold on the “Black Market,” another Hollander
cautionary tale, as timely today as it was when it was written
in 1948, and as long as there are people to buy those dreams,
there will be broken hearts—and, fortunately, deliciously, Ute
Lemper as their gimlet-eyed interpreter. |
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